Now, anyone familiar with the Meadows will have come across this spot or one very much like it.
On a hot summer’s day it is a perfect place to sit and if you have a mind, weave a series of impossible stories, with each tale more fantastical than the last.
We sought it out one Sunday and spent ten minutes just sitting amongst the trees and bushes gazing into the pond.
I remember it being dug out and filled with water, and back then there were few trees and bushes and the space around the pond was still pretty much bare earth.
But a couple of decades and a lot of nature and this haven has been transformed.
Anyone who has not been down on the Meadows for a while might be hard pressed to recognise it as it is now, and even more so for those who remember the very early days of the Mersey Valley.
That said there will be very few people who will remember the Meadows when it was farmed as meadow land.
In the 19th century great stretches of this area were deliberately flooded using irrigation channels which were then drained and flooded again in order to grow fresh grass in advance of the summer.
It was a carefully rehearsed process which required great vigilance and a degree of skill and experience.
If the water was not drained before the first real frosts arrived the farmer might be faced with a frozen field which would do the grass no favours.
By the beginning of the last century some of our farmers including Mr Higginbotham of the Green concluded that there was more money to be made by charging the people of Chorlton to use his frozen flooded field than there was from the use of the meadow grass.
All of which will no doubt bring forth a plethora of stories based on memories of playing on the meadows amongst the trees, or the whole dumping of waste by the Corporation.
Sadly I fear there will be no one left to tell me how much Mr Higginbotham charged or the lushness of that meadow grass.
So I shall just fall back on my memories of that Sunday morning. There was that feint hum of the motorway traffic which competed with the sound of insects and birds all of which added to the tranquillity of the spot.
Location; the Meadows,
Picture; the Meadows, Chorlton, 2018 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
We sought it out one Sunday and spent ten minutes just sitting amongst the trees and bushes gazing into the pond.
I remember it being dug out and filled with water, and back then there were few trees and bushes and the space around the pond was still pretty much bare earth.
But a couple of decades and a lot of nature and this haven has been transformed.
In the 19th century great stretches of this area were deliberately flooded using irrigation channels which were then drained and flooded again in order to grow fresh grass in advance of the summer.
It was a carefully rehearsed process which required great vigilance and a degree of skill and experience.
If the water was not drained before the first real frosts arrived the farmer might be faced with a frozen field which would do the grass no favours.
By the beginning of the last century some of our farmers including Mr Higginbotham of the Green concluded that there was more money to be made by charging the people of Chorlton to use his frozen flooded field than there was from the use of the meadow grass.
Sadly I fear there will be no one left to tell me how much Mr Higginbotham charged or the lushness of that meadow grass.
So I shall just fall back on my memories of that Sunday morning. There was that feint hum of the motorway traffic which competed with the sound of insects and birds all of which added to the tranquillity of the spot.
Location; the Meadows,
Picture; the Meadows, Chorlton, 2018 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
Remember it well there used to be a farm with cattle, a cricket pavilion, orchard , where the football ground is a scout hut, allotments used to have a bonfire each Nov 5th, Ditches where we would build rafts The Mersey would flood before the banks were built up.
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