Country Rambles, and Manchester Walks and Wild Flowers: Being Rural Wanderings in Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, and YorkshireGrindon, Leo H. (Leo Hartley)
History
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
Prestbury, a few miles beyond, also has great attractions for the
antiquary, the chancel and south aisle of the church being of about
A.D. 1130, while the school-house in the graveyard is entered by a
doorway with apparently Norman mouldings. The tower is about A.D. 1460.
If in search more particularly of rural pastime, we take the contrary
side of the line, and so through the lanes and fields to the delicious
Kerridge hills. Remarkable for their very sudden rise out of the
plain, these green and airy hills command views, like those obtained
at Alderley, of truly charming extent and variety. Tegsnose, at the
southern extremity, is thirteen hundred feet above the sea-level--the
little building just above Bollington, called "White Nancy," plainly
visible from the line near Wilmslow when the sunlight falls on it, is
nine hundred and thirty feet;--no wonder that from this last, since
there is nothing to intercept, the prospect in favourable weather
reaches to Liverpool, and even to the sweet wavy lavender upon the
horizon that indicates North Wales.
Bollington is now reached also by a line (part of the Manchester,
Sheffield, and Lincolnshire system,) which diverges for Macclesfield at
Woodley Junction. This perhaps gives nearer approach to the Kerridge
hills; in any case, it is the best to take for the extremely beautiful
adjacent neighbourhood, which for its little metropolis has the village
of Pott Shrigley. Before the opening of the line in question, the
station for this part was Adlington, on the London and North-Western.
Grand as the prospects have already been, above Pott Shrigley,
excepting only the "castled crag" at Beeston, all are surpassed. No
lover of the illimitable need go to Cumberland or Carnarvonshire for
a sight more glorious. Alderley Edge, rising out of the plain below,
seems only a mound. The plain itself stretches away far more remotely
than the eye can cover, no eminence of magnitude occurring nearer
than the Overton hills. The towers and spires of Bowdon and Dunham
are plainly distinguishable; and close by, in comparison, is the fine
western extremity of the Kerridge range, with "White Nancy,"--the hill
itself on which we stand, or rather seat ourselves, remembering the
picture in Milton,
See how the bee,
Sitting assiduous on the honeyed bloom,
Sucks liquid sweet,
just such a one as suggested that other immortal portrait,
Green, and of mild declivity, the last,
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there is no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape.
The time to go to this glad pinnacle is at the end of May or the
beginning of June, mounting the hill in the first instance, by the
immediate route from the station.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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