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
Reference was made, a page or two back, to Seal Bark. For this we
quit the line at Greenfield, first ascending past "Bin Green" to the
"Moorcock," vulgarly "Bill's-o'-Jack's," from the heights around which
the outlook over the adjacent country is once again marvellous. Very
curious, too, and in itself well worth the climb, is the far-seen rock
"Pots and Pans," well, if not elegantly, so named, for on drawing
near it is discovered to be an immense mass of millstone-grit, left
there since the glacial period, with about a dozen roundish cavities
upon the top, the largest of them more than a yard across by about
fifteen inches in depth, and nine of the group usually holding water.
Local superstition, as would be expected, attributes these singular
basins to the Druids, who are supposed to have excavated them for
ritual purposes; but, as in other places--for such cavities are by no
means confined to Greenfield--there can be no hesitation in regarding
them as pure works of nature. Millstone-grit is, in parts, peculiarly
inadhesive. Exposed as this rock has been for untold ages to the
beating of tempests, its softer portions, where the cavities are, have
been slowly fretted away, and we are asked to recall nothing more than
the ancient proverb. Keeping to the road, by degrees the elevation
becomes so great that the topmost part is playfully termed the "Isle
of Skye." It is hereabouts that the cloudberry, that most artistic of
northern fruits, never seen and unable to exist upon lower levels, is
for our own neighbourhood, so plentiful. When ripe, so thick is the
spread of rosy amber that the spectacle is most bright and pretty, the
ground seeming strewed with white-heart cherries. Singular to say,
although very nice to human palates, the grouse leave it untouched,
turning to the whortleberry and the cranberry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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