Today I decided to take a walk along one of the old field boundaries.
But of course as you would expect I have chosen to take the journey sometime in the summer of 1845. Now this is not as difficult as it would seem and I shall not slide into some fanciful romantic recreation of an idyllic rural spot.
The walk is based on the maps and records of the time, and I want to start with an advert. It is a little later than 1845, well actually twenty-one years to be exact but it is a good starting point, because in that year the five cottages and land belonging to Charles Bracegirdle were put up for auction.
It has much to tell us for not only do we have the name of the owner, but also those of the tenants, some of whom had been here in the summer of my walk, and we know their occupations, the rents they paid, and from all this something of what the cottages were like. But all of that is for later.
The summer of 1845 was mixed. The earlier part of the year had been cold with “heavy snow falls in March and despite a warm April May had been cold and dull. June by contrast was fine, but July brought thunderstorms and August was dull cloudy and wet. Only with September and harvest time did things improve, and the rest of autumn was mild and fairly dry.”*
So this is not the most promising of times to walk a field boundary. We are on the eastern edge of Oswald Field, which today faces that piece of open land on the corner of Oswald Road looking north and west towards Claridge Road. We know it as Oswald Field, earlier it went by the name of Oswald Croft and by the early 20th century was part of Oswald Lane, which in those days ran from Oswald Road down to Manchester Road. And for most of that century it was a narrow little road bounded by the backyards of Claridge Road and Fielden Terrace.
All around them there were small orchards and woodland, but for the Aldcroft and Barret families who had young children I guess it would have been the ponds which preoccupied them. There were plenty of these. Most were the result of digging for marl and clay and within just a short walk there were sixteen of varying size and I guess depth. Some like the large one directly opposite was described as a pond while others were marked as "Marl Pits.”**
Despite the evidence of the marl and clay diggings this was mostly meadow and pasture land and like the rest of the township was rented by a number of different tenant farmers and market gardeners.
So if we had followed the boundary away from the cottages it would have brought us to Red Gates Farm which today is the site of the library and the main road out of the township to Manchester.
Then as now it would have been busy with farmers and market gardeners travelling into the city with food for the markets and itinerant traders and carriers arriving with goods to sell or orders to deliver. There would also have been that Sunday trade, escaping the confines of industrial Manchester just 4 miles away for a walk with the family in the countryside or visiting our beer shops, pubs and hotels.
Their first port of call might well have been the old Royal Oak, or the beer shop of Mrs Leech, roughly I think where Manchester Road joins the modern Wilbraham Road. All of which has taken us away from our original field boundary and so is perhaps a good time to stop.
Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, September 16th 1865, detail from the 1841 OS Map of Lancashire courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
*Stratton, J.M, Agricultural Records, 1969
**the pond was on that southern side of Oswald Road, now occupied by the six semi detached houses, while the marl pits are now under Oswald Road school.
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