Hardy Farm ............ the picture I have never seen before

Now there are not that many pictures of Hardy Farm and that is a shame.

I included one of the most well known in the book on Chorlton but always cast around for more.*

During the writing of the book I became familiar with some of the farmers who lived there in the 19th century and collected stories from some who knew it from their child hood in the 1940’s and 50’s.

But the memories are fading and it will soon be a full half century since it was swept away for the ill fated UMIST sports scheme.

That said this picture brought back memories for  my friend Marion Jackson who remembers Hardy Farm.

“In my childhood the shed where the cows were milked was to the right. In front was a yard and further back to the right the orchard where the pigs were.

The track went down in front and then through the hawthorn hedges to Jacksons Boat.

I so loved my Sunday visits here with my father in the 40s. This was on his route to work in Sale from Withington by bike. Everything that my beloved father found interesting he showed to me.

This was a special favourite; I guess it reminded him of home in Cork. I used to look at the posh houses in South Drive as we cycled....guess where I lived for a happy 30 years? What a lovely life I have had.”

And that is all I have to say other than a thank you to Marion for sharing her recollections .

Picture; Hardy Farm, 1966, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy.html

Defending Chorlton and Didsbury from the fury of the Mersey

Now there is a caption competition here but I leave that to the swift of mind who can call up a witty aside on the turn of a sixpence.

All I will say is that we are back in 1966 at that point on the Mersey where the new bridge crosses the river by the pub.

And not for the first time over the last few centuries work is underway on the river banks,

These have been raised and raised to protect us from the river which in the past could flood with little warning and cover the meadows in a lake which stretched for miles.

The last time this happened on our side of the Mersey was in 1912 and there are pictures of the flood water poring over the weir which had been built to protect the Duke’s Canal.

There are plenty of stories of those flash floods which during the 19th century were common enough to enter local folk lore and have been reproduced in the book on Chorlton-cum-Hardy.*

And that is about all I am going to say other than that the story of Jackson’s Boat and its many different names is covered in that book and in the latest on Chorlton’s pubs and bars.**

But I shall just finish with one last comment on the image which and has recently come to light through a new project.

Neil Simpson tells me that "the Town Hall Photographer's Collection Digitisation Project, which is Volunteer led and Volunteer staffed, is in the process of systematically scanning the 200,000+ negatives in the collection dating from 1956 to 2007.

The plan is to gradually make the scanned images available online - initially on Manchester Archives+ Flickr and later on other Archives+ digital platforms.***"

*Manchester City Council Archives+ Town Hall Photographer's Collection Flickr Album...

And that is all I have to say other than a thank you to Neil and the team.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Down by the Mersey, 1966, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy.html 

**A new book on the pubs and bars of Chorlton, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/chorlton-pubs-and-bars-book-has-arrived.html

***Manchester City Council Archives+ Town Hall Photographer's Collection Flickr Album...

Hardy Farm ..... on the edge of the Township

 This is Hardy Farm at the end of Hardy Lane, and you will have to be of an age to remember it.

Hardy Farm, 1965

It has gone now, but it appears on Yate’s map of Lancashire for 1786 and may date back further into the 18th century.

In 1845 it was home to tenant farmer John Cook who farmed 29 acres of meadow, arable and pasture, included in which there was three quarters of an acre of woodland and an acre of orchard.

Four years earlier the census records that he lived here with his wife, five children and Thomas Hand.

The family were methodists and his standing in the community was such that he was a member of the Rate Payer’s Committee and in 1848 was one of the two elected Overseers for the Committee.

The farm stood on the edge of Chorlton and strictly was in the small hamlet of Hardy out by the River Mersey.

Hardy, Chorlton and bit more, 1830

This was a lonely spot which at one point in 1830 could boast five cottages as well as the farm.

But the cottages appear to have been progressively abandoned with the last residents leaving in the early 1850s.

Location; Hardy

Pictures; Hardy Farm, 1965 from the 1965 Collection, and Hennet’s map of Lancashire 1830

Floodlit ice skating on Chorlton Meadows ....... now that doesn’t happen any more

I am back on the meadows thinking of warm summer's walks.

All of which is a far cry from those winters we used to have when freezing temperatures brought the promise of ice skating on the meadows.

It is a story I have regularly revisited and will do so again with this newspaper cutting from the Manchester Guardian of December 22 1938.*

The headline ran "Winter Sports in the North" and then did nothing to fulfil the promise with the follow up headline “Little Skating Yet in Manchester Area”, which is one of those stories which raise you up only to dash you down again.

“The frost has not been severe enough to provide safe skating on any but the shallowest water, and there is only a bare inch or two of snow for sledging.”

That said here in Chorlton “Manchester’s biggest sheet of bearing ice is the one at Chorlton Meadows, in Brookburn Road, Chorlton.

Nearly twenty degrees of frost in the early hours of yesterday produced a good surface there, as the water is shallow and still and quite a number of people were on it in the morning.

School children who had broken up for the holidays joined in the fun during the afternoon, and when darkness came the ice was floodlit.”*

Now I first came across the skating stories on the meadows in the 1970s and only half believed them despite photographs and the testimony of old friends.  More recently as I researched the science of meadow farming

I became even more sceptical, as all the farming authorities argued that letting meadow land freeze over was bad practice.

But the stories of went on down there wouldn’t go away and so it seems the folk tales and the pictures were not one offs but pretty much how it was when we had long cold winters.

And of course this newspaper cutting brings us into a period which is still within living memory and just possibly there will be people who skated into the floodlit evening.

If so I would love to hear from them.

And perhaps on subsequent days because in the same edition the Guardian warned that there was an increased demand for coal more than was usual in the run up to Chritsmas with the chance that some would face delays in getting their supply.

Which was pretty much my fear in the run up to this year's holidays, but that is another story.

Instead I will finish with this from David Bishop, "Mrs Margaret Brown of Stretford (a lady now in her 90s) told me that she remembered skating on the Meadows.She said that the farmer had a little booth and you had to pay him a penny to skate on his meadow".

Pictures; the meadows on a bleak December day in 2001, from the collection of David Bishop, and skating on Chorlton Meadows from the Manchester Courier, 1914 courtesy of Sally Dervan, 


*Winter Sports in the North, Manchester Guardian, December 22 1938

To flood or not? ……. stories from an older Chorlton

One of the great delights of living in Chorlton has to be the Meadows or to give them their own name …… Chorlton Eees.

The Meadows , 2018

The Meadows has its own Facebook site, Friends group and is listed on the city councils’ digest of parks and open spaces, which incidentally adds that the feature of the area is “woodlands”.

Now that inclusion of woodlands runs counter to my idea of meadows, which according to my Wikipedia is an area "of one or more plant communities dominated by herbaceous species. water and/or shallow ground water (generally at depths of less than one meter, or three feet). Woody vegetation, like trees or shrubs, may be found in meadows but is not dominant".*

Farming the Meadows, 1950s

To which Mr. Wikipedia goes on to define an ees as “an archaic English term for a piece of land liable to flood, or water meadow”.**

So, there you have it, and our Meadows historically conform to that.  

They are part of the flood plain of the Mersey and both the historical sources and old maps and photographs record that the densely packed woodland we now know was absence until recently.

I had always thought that they were meadowland used for growing spring grass and taking advantage of the abundance of water, because meadow farming requires careful flooding, draining and reflooding a patch of land using irrigation channels.

It is a precise way of farming, and the farmer must pay careful attention to the cycle.

The Meadows, 1950s

I first came across it in my copy of The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens.***

It was written in 1844 and ran to countless editions. It was the manual for anyone wanting to be a farmer. Everything is here from what crops to plant and when to how to make a well, as well as sound advice on hiring labourers, the construction of a water meadow, and the best location for the milk house and cheese room. 

I learned which materials were best for building a farm house and how much I could expect to pay for materials, as well as the most up to date scientific information on planting wurzels.

The Meadows, circa 1900s

It was a practical book and so “the cost of digging a well in clay, eight feet in diameter and sixteen deep and building a ring three feet in diameter with dry rubble masonry is only L5 [£5] exclusive of carriage and the cost of pumps.”***

And it was the chapter on water meadows that convinced me along with the tithe schedule for 1845 which listed much of the land on the flood plain as meadow.

And I said so in my book on “The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy”.****

But now I am revising that interpretation after a long conversation with my botanist chum Dave Bishop who been associated with our meadows ever since it came under the umbrella of the Mersey Valley.

Dave cites some pretty convincing evidence that our meadows were a specialist variation and used the regular flooding of the Mersey to facilitate the farming.

Cows on the Meadows, 2008

Added to which it offers up a continuity because as along as I can remember cows were quartered on the meadows, a practice which lasted until relatively recently and this was an aspect of the management flood meadows. 

It may seem a nerdy distinction to some but makes perfect sense and opens a wealth of further investigation.

And of course a valued contribution from Dave.

Location; the Meadows

Pictures; of the Meadows, 2018 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Dave Bishop 2008 and from the Lloyd Collection, circa 1900, and 1950s

*Meadow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadow

**Ees, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ees_(place_name)

*** The Book of the Farm by Henry Stephens, 1844

****“The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy” Andrew Stephens, 2012

Following the course of the Kickety Brook, from Chorlton

It’s not the best outcome for a watercourse which once ran free across across the meadows but it is an all too familiar one.

If I have my geography correct then this is the Kickety Brook which I first came across when researching the weir which had been built in the late 18th century to protect the Duke’s Canal from a sudden surge of flood water.

Now this was all too common an occurrence before the beginning of the 20th century and there are plenty of stories of farmers being caught out by the speed and force of the Mersey in full flood.

On one occasion a farmer just had time to unhitch his horse from the wagon before being engulfed and on another hay ricks swept out of the fields near Barlow Hall Farm were deposited back a day or so later and Thomas Elwood our local historian described a vast lake of water stretching back across to the Mersey after one flood in the 1880s.

So strong was that force that the first weir was destroyed and had to be rebuilt in the 1840s.

After which it continued to do its job of breaking the flood surge and directing it out across open land towards the Kickety Brook.

Back then the brook must have been a far more attractive water course than the one that Andy Robertson photographed recently.

Of course with the passing of farming in the area water courses can seem to be a nuisance.  At best they are neglected and at worse they are full of all sorts of rubbish.

Added to which great stretches flow in concrete channels which do nothing for what was once a vital part of the countryside offering a home to wildlife and a place of mystery and fun to young children.

In some places these channels have been torn up to allow the water to flow freely once again.

One such is the river Quaggy in south east London and the result has been to create haven for all sorts of animals.

Sadly not so this bit of the Kickety Brook, but maybe the future will be different.

Pictures; the Kickety Brook, February 2015 from the collection of Andy Robertson

Chorlton Brook, meadowland and a winters day

Chorlton Brook can seem a pleasant and benign bit of water.

Come across it on a warm summer’s day as it flows under the Brookburn Bridge and it looks pretty peaceful.

And when the children were young it was a favourite walk of ours, following its course past “secret pathways” and on to where it joins the Mersey.

Of course all the land on either side has changed dramatically and what you see now is a product of tipping and landscaping.

My friend David often rails against the policy of tree planting that has been undertaken over the years.

After all, everything you can see from the Brook to the river was until recently farmed as meadow land.*

Meadowland is grassland that is kept damp by the use of ditches called carriers worked by sluice gates fed from a river.

The skill is to keep the land fed with water up to an inch in depth through from October to January, for about fifteen to twenty days at a time before allowing the water to run off into the drainage ditches.

The land must then be left to dry out for 5-6 days so that the air can get to the grass.  The early watering took advantage of the autumnal floods which brought with them a mix of nutrients and silt which enriched the land.

In 1845 there were 680 acres of meadow and pasture compared to 490 arable acres and 10 of woodland.

But all of that has gone, and now pretty much the only reminder of what went on is the Brook and even that has changed.

So here are two of Andy Robertson’s picture taken sometime in the 1990s when the brook was in full flow.

Pictures; from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Remembering the meadows in the 1940s ..... the power of oral testimony, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/remembering-meadows-in-1940s-power-of.html

Watching the waters of the Brook rise in 1996

The Brook in 1996

I am back by Chorlton Brook with two of Andy Robertson’s pictures.

Now I have always had a fascination for the Brook which rises out beyond Manchester in the east, flows through the south of the city and meets the Mersey here on Chorlton.

More of this water course is open to the skies than most people realize and for me the best is the stretch from Hough End to the river.

That said some of it is still difficult to access and it really only becomes possible to walk beside it from
Brookburn Road as it meanders across the meadows.

Long ago it was where we went with the lads when they were young and more than once they were tempted by that long branch which hung over the water.

As a responsible father they never got the chance to test its strength, although I can’t say what happened when they were there alone.

In all those years I don’t remember it as high as in these pictures and is a reminder that once both the brook and the Mersey were prone to flooding.

Now those events are well documented so I shall just leave you with these two photographs and the promise of more to come.*




Pictures; courtesy of Andy Robertson

*Chorlton rivers, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20rivers

Skating on the meadows ........ the story that just won't go away

Skating on the meadows in 1914

Now the skating story on the meadows just won’t go away.

I was once rather dismissive of the popularly held belief that during the winter parts of the meadow were opened up as places for people to skate.

According to Henry Stephens who wrote a popular manual on farming in the 1840s a good farmer never let his water meadows freeze over as this could damage the young grass that was grown on these flooded fields.*

So the skill was to flood, drain and flood again at regular intervals always ensuring that you were not caught out by a fall in the temperature.

Now I was prepared to accept that occasionally a farmer might be caught out but going with Mr Stephens I doubted that this was something of a general rule.

The one picture I had I put down to bad timing followed by an opportunistic moment.

Where you could skate in the January of 1909

But no, by the turn of the last century it was a common thing for these fields to be turned over to skating.

Sally has turned up a series of newspaper clippings including pictures and reports that all show that our farmers were taking advantage of their frozen water logged fields and I am sure was quick to charge.

So along with farmer Higginbotham whose family had farmed by the green since the 1840s there were Mr Wood and Cookson who “had been associated for years in the joint enterprise of flooding the Chorlton meadows.”*

Back out on the icy meadows, January 1909

And according the Manchester Courier in the January of 1909, “among the places where skating was permitted yesterday and where of course providing the frost holds out there will be skating today at Bailey’s Meadows Chorlton, Chorlton Meadows, Broughton Park and Lindow Common Wilmslow.  

The ice on Trafford Park lake was not regarded as sufficiently thick to permit of skating yesterday, but provided the present weather conditions continue there should be some today. At Bell Vue also it may be possible to skate today.”***

So there you have it skating the natural way was going on across the city and especially here in Chorlton, and makes you wonder why they ever bothered to open that skating Ring on Oswald Road.

But that is for later in the month.

*The Book of Farming, Henry Stephens, 1844

**The Herald, April 1902

***Manchester Courier, January 1909



Picture; Skating on Chorlton Meadows from the Manchester Courier, 1914 and newspaper material, courtesy of Sally Dervan

Friends of Chorlton Meadows

It is a long time since I last referred to my old friend David Bishop’s excellent blog about Chorlton Meadows. http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/ David introduced me to Richard Buxton the working class botanist. I have been featuring his life in a series of instalments and would recommend his stories on Buxton and the other working class botanists at http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/2012/02/historical-background-to-study-of.html

Picture; Snow storm on the meadows from the collection of David Bishop