INTRODUCTION. 3 
state of comparative purity. In the south-west the 
chief streams are the Dee, there a broad and placid 
river, and the sluggish Gowy, which, rising at Bunbury, 
flows through low-lying meadows and enters the Mersey 
Estuary near Stanlow Point. The principal river of 
the Cheshire Plain, however, is the Weaver, which 
drains the whole of its central and southern portions. 
From its source in the Peckforton Hills, the Weaver 
has a south-easterly course to Audlem on the Stafford- 
shire border, thence it runs almost due north through 
Nantwich to Northwich, where it receives the combined 
waters of its tributary streams, the Wheelock and 
Dane. From Northwich to Frodsham, where it enters 
the Mersey Estuary, the Weaver entirely loses its rural 
character, becoming a navigable stream thronged with 
barges employed in the salt and chemical trades. The 
Dane, running though it does through the consider- 
able town of Congleton, is a rapid and fairly pure 
stream at Middlewich; and the Dipper, in Cheshire so 
characteristic of the Hill Country, still nests on its 
banks at Holmes Chapel. 
The small lakes, or meres as they are locally called, 
are a very characteristic feature of the Cheshire Plain. 
Many of them owe their existence to the subsidence 
of the land overlying the rock-salt deposits. Water 
percolating the beds has gradually dissolved the salt 
and carried it away by means of brine springs, and a 
depression has resulted. The ‘flashes’ in the neigh- 
bourhood of Northwich and Winsford are being formed 
at the present time in a similar manner by the artificial 
pumping of the brine. The largest of these meres are 
Rostherne, Mere, Tatton, Arley, Tabley, Pickmere, and 
Great Budworth, forming a group in the north; Radnor 
and Redes Mere in the east; Crewe, Doddington, 
