An unfamiliar photograph and a lost cottage

Sometimes you come across a picture which you know has rarely seen the light of day and yet must at one time have been familiar to everyone in the township. 

It’s of the parish church looking north from the meadows.

To our right is the back of the old Bowling Green Hotel and in the distance framed between the church and the large house is the barn of the Higginbotham’s who lived on the green and had farmed here since the 1840s.

It is a pleasant enough rural scene but has undergone some alteration.

To the right of the large brick house stood a one up one down cottage which had become run down.

Someone and I guess it was the company who issued the postcard had painted it out by extending the bushes and trees behind the pile of bricks.

The building can just be made out in a monochrome copy of the same photograph dated sometime in the 1890s and originally owned by a May Boardman.

Our postcard issued by H.Burt of Chorlton was sent in the May of 1906.

Picture; from  the collection of Rita Bishop