1 62 Country Rambles. 



formed of the route it may be pleasantest now to follow. 

 No part is uninteresting; the question is simply where to 

 begin. Compared with the warm glades of Cheshire, 

 Bamford Wood is upon the average quite a fortnight 

 later in escaping from winter. Spring's "curled darlings" 

 have already stepped into the green parlours of the 

 Bollin valley, while up here a leaf is scarcely open; even 

 the palm-willow, elsewhere always ready for the earliest 

 April bee, is cautious and dilatory. The most interesting 

 plant of the wood is the Rubus saxatilis, which, though 

 found nowhere else in the neighbourhood of Manchester, 

 is abundant near Coal-bank Bridge, but very seldom 

 flowers. On some of the cliffs, at a tantalizing height, 

 just out of reach of the longest arm, grows that beautiful 

 sylvan shrub the Tutsan, Hypericum Androsczmum. The 

 sides of the glen are in most parts lofty and steep, clothed 

 with trees, and often decorated with little waterfalls, while 

 the bed of the stream itself is so rugged that the wood 

 after much rain is rilled with the sound of its hindered 

 efforts to escape. On emerging from the wood, at the 

 upper extremity, or furthest from Simpson Clough, there 

 is a fine walk over Ashworth Moor to Bury, from which 

 place also it may be approached. 



In 1839 there was no "Lancashire and Yorkshire 

 Railway." Now by its help we reach the beautiful sheet of 

 water called, popularly, "Hollingworth Lake" but which, 

 like the water at Lymm, Rudyard, and Taxal, is really 

 no more than a reservoir, constructed about seventy years 

 ago to supply, in part, the Rochdale and Manchester 



