Skating on the meadows

I was saving this picture for another winter, but perhaps as April moves into May and we begin to get a few more warmer days it will remind us of the winter, which I do like.

The caption says “skating on the meadows circa 1920s, the old Sewage Farm can be seen in the background.”  The picture belonged to D. Rendell who provided a number of pictures for the Lloyd collection.
Now in some books it is referred to as Higginbotham’s field and the family had been rented land here on this spot from the mid 1840s.

What we now call the meadows was a vast stretch of land from the edge of the village on either side of the brook up to the Mersey, and some was farmed as real meadow land which involved regularly flooding it and managing the water flow to ensure that the grass grew up earlier than the surrounding pasture land.  And this may be the origin of the well known belief that old farmer Higginbotham deliberatly flooded the field for skating.  Now this is unlikely as the expert advice was that to prevent damage to the grass the water should be drained off before the frost.  Now this warning  comes from my old friend Henry Stephens whose book on farming was written in the 1840s and which helped me  unlock so much about how we farmed the township in the mid 19th century.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection