Country Rambles, and Manchester Walks and Wild Flowers: Being Rural Wanderings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and YorkshireGrindon, Leo H. (Leo Hartley)
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Country Rambles, and Manchester Walks and Wild Flowers: Being Rural Wanderings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire
Grindon, Leo H. (Leo Hartley)
England -- Description and travel; Natural history -- England -- Manchester
For the return, we may either mount the hill, and get into the lanes
which pass through Hale or Ringway, and so to Altrincham; or we may
follow the downward course of the stream, by the path enjoyed in
coming, as far as Warburton's farm, already mentioned. Arrived here,
for variety sake, the better course is not by the tempting green
lane, but through the fields below and to the left, which are full of
every kind of rural beauty, and here and there gemmed with cowslips.
Different paths take us either past the river again, and so by way of
Ashley to Bowdon, or into the road that leads to the Downs. The latter
is the shortest, but the Ashley way is the pleasanter. The distance in
the whole is a trifle over that by the road, or, omitting fractions,
four miles. All the way along the birds are in full trill; with this
great charm in the sound, that independently of the music, the songs
of birds are always songs of pleasure. _We_ sing in many moods, and
for many purposes, but the birds only when they are happy. No notes
of birds have an undertone of sadness in them. Beautiful, too, in
the early summer, is it to mark here the glow of the red horizontal
sunlight, as it lies softly amid the branches of the golden-budded
oak, and the milk-white blossoms of the tall wild cherries. Oh! how
thoughtless is it of people to let themselves be scared away from
Botany by its evil but undeserved reputation for "hard names," when,
with a tenth of the effort given to the study of chess or whist, they
might master everything needful, and enter intelligently into this
sweet and sacred Temple of Nature.
* * * * *
The interest of the Bollin valley is quite as great to the entomologist
as to the botanist. By the kindness of my friend, Mr. Edleston, I am
enabled here to add the following list of the Lepidoptera, which will
be read with pleasure by every one acquainted with the exquisite forms
and patrician dresses of English butterflies.
"The meadows," he tells me, "near the river Bollin, from Bank Hall to
Castle Mill, produce more diurnal Lepidoptera than any other locality
in the Manchester district, as the following select list (1858) will
suffice to prove":--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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