Boggart-hole Clough. 155 



"Look ! " said the rural children in the lanes, amazed 

 that any one could care for such rubbish, " there's a 

 man been getting moss-crops ! " All the mosses about 

 Manchester produce the cotton-sedge, but never have we 

 seen such luxuriant specimens as in the ditches that were 

 then being cut for the draining of White Moss. Three 

 species occur, the broad-leaved, the narrow-leaved, and 

 the single-flowered, the tufts of the latter being upright 

 instead of pendulous. Their beauty, unhappily, is their 

 only recommendation, for the herbage is rough and coarse, 

 and altogether unfit for pasture, and the cotton, so-called, 

 is cotton only in name. It cannot be manufactured; the 

 hairs are too straight and too brittle. Instead of twining 

 and entangling, like the filaments of true cotton, they lie 

 rigidly side by side, resembling true cotton merely in 

 their whiteness, and could no more be spun into yarn 

 than slate-pencils could be twisted into a cable. 



Boggart-hole Clough, a little nearer Manchester, was 

 reached most readily at the time spoken of, and of course 

 is so still, by way of Oldham Road, going by omnibus 

 or tram-car as far as the end of the first lane carried over 

 the railway. There are plenty of roads under arches 

 formed by the railway, but these will not do; it must be the 

 first that goes over the embankment. Crossing the line at 

 the point in question, a descending path presently brings 

 us to Jack's Bridge, a sweet little dell, consecrated by one 

 of nature's own poets, then a resident at Newton Heath : 



Jack's Bridge ! thy road is rough, 

 But thy wild-flowers are sweet 1 



