It is a field name which could have come straight off one of those saucy seaside postcards, but it’s real enough. And as I said yesterday made perfect sense given that it bordered Stretford Park.
Now some of you will spot that the photograph cropped up just a few weeks ago when I was writing about the Rough Leech Gutter* and those with powerful memories that I used it much earlier in the year but I think it is worth another look.
Away past the bridge to the left of the houses is what is now Chorlton Park, while just over the brook and is Hough End Hall which like our field was actually in Withington.
It is impossible to know for certain but I suspect that the horses we can see come from Hough End Hall, although it is equally possible that they belonged to Park Brow Farm which was a little further to our right where Sandy Lane joins Nell Lane.
I rather think we are sometime in the early 20th century. By the late 1920s, the Park had been laid out, Nell Lane widened and the old low bridge replaced by a new one.
What I like about the picture and why I am drawn back to it is because it captures for me that rural past which was Chorlton and would soon be no more.
It is getting to late afternoon and the horses have been brought out after a day in the fields. There are still plenty of small ponds which were a feature of the township and can be seen in all the old maps.
But soon the last of these will be drained, and the lazy little streams buried in brick culverts leaving just a few old water filled brick pits up by Oswald Road. And it is doubtful that the group of boys who have gathered to watch are from farming families. Most if not all will be from that row of houses we can see or from the smaller ones directly behind and their parents will clerks, shop keepers, warehouseman and perhaps a few professionals.
All of which points to the way the township was going. So dear reader gaze on this photograph of Bottoms of Stretford Park and reflect soon enough it would become something different.
* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/of-lost-streams-half-forgotten-films.html
Picture; from the Lloyd collection
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