The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*
Now strictly speaking it wasn’t one fox it was two, and it was more the early hours of the morning when they parked themselves beside our tree and began that distinctive noise foxes make.
And it was that noise which woke us up, and as you do for a while I tried to ignore it but it didn’t go away and so I went to look.
There were two of them, one making the noise just sitting beside the tree, and the other prowling behind.
Of course by the time I decided to take a picture they had gone, no doubt to disturb someone else.
So instead of a picture of two foxes beside out tree at 2 in the morning you got the tree on its own at 11 am.
It isn’t the first time I have seen a fox on Beech Road, but it is the first time that they took up residence on our front doorstep.
And that made me think about how common they would have been when Joe and Mary Ann moved in to the house when it was built in 1915. Back then there was still a large amount of farmland to the south of the house all the way down to the river and beyond, and so I suspect that there were foxes.
Go back another half century and they would definitely been a feature of the landscape.
All of which makes for one of those little bits of continuity between us and Joe and Mary Ann.
Of course in the intervening century the urban development will have pushed the foxes out, but as in many towns and cities they are back, finding different things to eat and exchanging fields for pavements and back gardens.
There will be someone I know who will contribute a comment on the rise of the urban fox, but for now I will just close by saying how large they looked.
Location; Chorlton
Pictures; from the collections of Lois Elsden & Andrew Simpson, 1974-2018
*The story of a house, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
 |
| The tree without the foxes, 2018 |
And it was that noise which woke us up, and as you do for a while I tried to ignore it but it didn’t go away and so I went to look.
There were two of them, one making the noise just sitting beside the tree, and the other prowling behind.
Of course by the time I decided to take a picture they had gone, no doubt to disturb someone else.
So instead of a picture of two foxes beside out tree at 2 in the morning you got the tree on its own at 11 am.
It isn’t the first time I have seen a fox on Beech Road, but it is the first time that they took up residence on our front doorstep.
And that made me think about how common they would have been when Joe and Mary Ann moved in to the house when it was built in 1915. Back then there was still a large amount of farmland to the south of the house all the way down to the river and beyond, and so I suspect that there were foxes.
 |
| The old tree, 1974 |
All of which makes for one of those little bits of continuity between us and Joe and Mary Ann.
Of course in the intervening century the urban development will have pushed the foxes out, but as in many towns and cities they are back, finding different things to eat and exchanging fields for pavements and back gardens.
There will be someone I know who will contribute a comment on the rise of the urban fox, but for now I will just close by saying how large they looked.
Location; Chorlton
Pictures; from the collections of Lois Elsden & Andrew Simpson, 1974-2018
*The story of a house, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house
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