MEMORIES OF A CHESHIRE MOOR 97 



Nurseries and plantations had come into being, but here 

 and there a patch of bilberry or a clump of ling clung 

 tenaciously to the edge of a ditch. Sidings from the main 

 lines wandered, apparently aimlessly, into ploughed 

 fields; but at the end of these tracks were piles of top- 

 dressing, including tins and pots, old boots, and all the 

 flotsam and jetsam of Manchester's ever-flowing human 

 tide. Acres and acres were under cultivation, but where 

 clearing ^vas still in process big pools of shallow water, 

 not overclean, were the feeding-ground of the black- 

 headed gull, which had discovered that ShudehilTs fishy 

 refuse was palatable if ancient. 



We were musing over the past history of an umbrella 

 handle, that lay amongst the cinders, the metal of the 

 permanent way, when the sun broke through the clouds. 

 Immediately every field, ploughed or harrowed, flashed 

 out innumerable heliographic signals; the brown, peaty 

 earth was thick with scintillating diamonds, for there 

 is beauty even in the broken glass of countless discarded 

 bottles. 



1914 



The farm had come to stay; the land was tilled. Low 

 but thick quickset hedges, adorned with the fragrant 

 May, lined the old drainage ditches. The main railway 

 lines remained, but the blanches, the sidings, where they 

 had not been removed, were rusted and disused, lost in 

 fields of thick and healthy grass. Manchester refuse 

 had fulfilled its promise, had proved fruitful; save for the 

 level chessboard of fields there was little difference between 

 the Moss and the surrounding country. The corn bunting 

 was no longer in evidence, but the starling, thrush, and 

 blackbird worked the ground for grubs and worms which 

 never appeared amongst the heather ; linnets nested in the 

 hedgerows, and the partridge called where once the red 



