Skating on the meadows in 1914

Well here we are skating on the meadows in 1914.

It was judging by the pictures and folk memory a popular activity and one that I have known about since I first washed up in Chorlton nearly 40 years ago.

But with all the arrogance of someone who had never seen it I always only half accepted that it was such a common activity.

It wasn’t that I doubted what people told me of what they remembered but more that the fields we now know as the meadows were part of a carefully managed stretch of land which did not benefit from being covered by ice.

These were the water meadows and were farmed to produce early grass which could be fed to cattle.

This involved carefully flooding and draining the land at regular intervals and always being mindful that if the water froze it would do the young grass no favours.

So farmers like Mr Higginbotham whose family had been here on the green from the early 1840s would never have been caught out by a sudden frost.

But the stories persisted that old Higginbotham at the turn of the last century did flood one of his fields to create a skating area.

Now until recently all I had to go on was one photograph and a handful of accounts all of which may have been drawn from that picture or from just one source.

But more photographs have turned up and I am inclined to fall on the side that this was a more common event than I had thought.

Mr Higginbotham may have just been caught out by events having miscalculated the weather or perhaps the field in question was no longer used as a water meadow for bringing on early grass.

Certainly within a few decades the meadows would no longer be used for this traditional way of farming, and now there is little evidence left of the drainage ditches which ran across the area.

All of which is a nice lesson in not becoming too arrogant about what you think you know, and instead as a good historian pay a lot more heed to popular folk memories.

Looking closely at the pictures it is just possible to make out a blur of a building in the background which might just be the old parish church, which in turn will fasten the image on that bit of land just beyond and to west of the modern car park

That said I do draw a line at the notion that the township is crisscrossed by hidden tunnels linking the old parish church to a pub and another running from one of our halls to another.

But that is for another time.

I shall just finish by wondering if Mr Higginbotham charged for the use of his frozen field.  I have on evidence he did but I doubt that he would have passed up such an opportunity.

Pictures; from Manchester Courier, 1914 courtesy of Sally Dervan