I have seen better pictures, but as you would expect there is a story. The caption records “Looking down Rifle Road from the footbridge after the gate had been removed and the toll abolished.”
Now there is no date on the photograph but the reference to the abolition of the toll must place it sometime in the late 1940s, although I don’t have an exact year.
The right to charge goes back to before there was a bridge, when anyone wanting to cross the bridge at this point had to be ferried across by row boat, and as late as the 1830s long after the first wooden bridge had been erected the landlord of the pub retained the right to charge a fee to take people.
It was the enterprising Sam Wilton sometime publican who built the first wooden bridge in 1818 with a mind no doubt to cash in on the illegal sport of prize fighting which attracted huge crowds and took place on the meadows. His pub was well placed to benefit from the trade of the thirsty spectators, who might also use the bridge to escape into Cheshire should the authorities turn up to affect arrests.
"And so it was that in the summer of 1848 Samuel Warburton was twenty minutes into a fight watched by two to three hundred spectators when the police turned up. They had been alerted by Samuel Dean of Barlow Farm who had been alarmed at such a large gathering at 5.30 on a Sunday morning. The crowd and the boxers duly escaped but a little after seven the same morning Samuel was arrested in the Horse and Jockey," but that is another story, which is told in the book.*
*Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the story of the township in the 19th century, due out later in the year, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
Picture; by Thomas Turner from the Lloyd collection
The right to charge goes back to before there was a bridge, when anyone wanting to cross the bridge at this point had to be ferried across by row boat, and as late as the 1830s long after the first wooden bridge had been erected the landlord of the pub retained the right to charge a fee to take people.
It was the enterprising Sam Wilton sometime publican who built the first wooden bridge in 1818 with a mind no doubt to cash in on the illegal sport of prize fighting which attracted huge crowds and took place on the meadows. His pub was well placed to benefit from the trade of the thirsty spectators, who might also use the bridge to escape into Cheshire should the authorities turn up to affect arrests.
"And so it was that in the summer of 1848 Samuel Warburton was twenty minutes into a fight watched by two to three hundred spectators when the police turned up. They had been alerted by Samuel Dean of Barlow Farm who had been alarmed at such a large gathering at 5.30 on a Sunday morning. The crowd and the boxers duly escaped but a little after seven the same morning Samuel was arrested in the Horse and Jockey," but that is another story, which is told in the book.*
*Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the story of the township in the 19th century, due out later in the year, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
Picture; by Thomas Turner from the Lloyd collection
That pathway into the woods looks so inviting.
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