The best way to the valley on foot is to go over Kersal Moor, descending on the further side, and so onward, past the print–works, to Agecroft Bridge, which we must cross, and turn to the right. If more convenient, there is a way by Pendleton and Charlestown, crossing the Bolton railway, then along the path by the river–side. But this, as to its earlier part, is a disagreeable means of access, and very little is really gained. Going by Kersal, on the other hand, we come at once into a green, sequestered walk, which accompanying the river for about a mile, then changes to the bank of the canal, and will take us, if we please, to the aqueduct, and thence round by the cottages to the station. The road straight away from the bridge leads to Pendlebury, to which village there is also a pleasant path across the fields, after ascending the river–side some little distance. Keeping to the Kersal side of the river there is a delightful walk through Agecroft Park, beneath the woods, to the foot of the dells; another, by diverging a little to the left when out of the park, through a farmyard, to the river and viaduct; and if, instead of going through the park, we turn up on the right among the cottages, it is not difficult to penetrate the woods themselves, and to find one or two paths over the hills, all tending to Prestwich as a common point. So numerous and varied are the paths which converge hitherwards and in the direction of Clifton Aqueduct, that it is impossible to go wrong. Were we to give a preference, it would be to the walk first described, or that along the river–side, commencing at Agecroft Bridge, and having the river upon the right. The meadows abound with floral treasures, the rosy bistort, the blue geranium, and the fragrant ciceley, in their several seasons, and on the banks, at the further part, near the canal, may be seen the broad–leaved wood–stitchwort, Stellaria memorum, and the yellow dead–nettle. Early in June is the pleasantest time to go. The grass is then uncut, the sycamores are hung with their honeyed bloom, the clover glows like rubies, the white pagodas of the butter–bur, now gone to seed, stand up like the banners of an army, and we find “the first rose of summer, sweet blooming alone,” amid thousands of juvenile green buds.
But the yellow dead–nettle is the most interesting; it gives so useful a lesson in practical botany. The stem is perfectly square; the leaves grow two together; the large golden–coloured blossoms are set in verandahs round the stalk, each particular flower shaped like the jaws of some terrible wild beast, wide–open and ready to bite, while the stamens are invariably four in number—a pair of long ones and a pair of short ones. The seeds, also, are exactly four. Whenever these peculiarities co–exist in a plant, we may be sure that there is nothing deleterious about it. More than fifty different plants formed on this plan grow wild in England, and considerably over two thousand in foreign countries, and not one of them is in the least degree noxious, either to quadruped or to man. Many are aromatic, and used with food, as thyme, sage, mint, basil, and penny–royal; while others are useful for medicinal tea, as balm and ground–ivy. Rosemary, lavender, and bergamot belong to the same fragrant family. The great object of botanical science is to determine such facts as these, i.e., to make out the relation between the form of a plant and its properties;—can a science of such useful, practical aim be justly deemed, as by some, mere “learned trifling?” Surely not. No slight advantage has that man over his fellows who, when he is walking through the meadows, or when he emigrates to a distant land, can discriminate between the poisonous plant and the wholesome, simply by examining the leaves and flowers. We do not mean to say that every individual plant in the world has its exact quality unmistakably configured upon it. The concurrence is between certain general properties and certain great types or plans of organisation, taking note of which latter we gain a good general idea of the former. The particular nature must be learned by special inquiry. Though the yellow dead–nettle, for example, is shown by its general structure to be devoid of anything bad, it cannot be told whether it is fit to eat until tasted and tried. To persons who have an idea of emigrating, or whose children are likely to go abroad, botany is of the very highest service, for in foreign countries men are thrown upon their own resources, and to be compelled by ignorance to look upon every leaf as a possible poison is helplessness of the most wretched kind.
The railway up the Agecroft valley is interesting as the first that was constructed after the Liverpool and Manchester, and perhaps the “Grand Junction.” People used to go to the Prestwich hills to watch the trains scudding along. The scenery here is certainly not spoiled by it. For our own part, we consider that scenery is scarcely ever spoiled by the presence of railways, and would contend rather that they are a capital addition; for those spectacles are always most salutary to the mind, and therefore most truly pleasing, where along with rural beauties are combined the grand circumstances of human life and human enterprise. Railways count with bridges, ships, gardens, the castles and abbeys of the past, and the mansions of the present. Nature is beautiful, even in its most retired and lonely solitudes, just in the proportion that we connect with it, though unconsciously, the interests, the feelings, the aspirations of humanity; the more of what is noble and comely in human life we are able to assimilate with the outer world, the more does that world minister to our happiness and our intelligence. In the case of the railways, we are recipients of an immense amount of good. There is not only the interest of what is witnessed on the instant, but the pleasant flow of remembrance of the various localities they lead to. As, looking at the sea, we are led in thought all round the world, so, looking at the winged train and its pearly clouds, we visit over again a thousand delicious spots, photographed on the mind, and endeared by association. Here, for instance, in the valley of the Irwell, we go on to the lakes of Cumberland, and its ancient and purple mountains, and anon to the flowered and roofless aisles of sacred Furness. Should these be places yet unknown, there are nearer ones where we have been,—Rivington, Summerseat, Hoghton Tower, with its precipitous beechen–wood and lovely walk by the river underneath; or Southshore, where grow the blue eryngo and the grass of Parnassus, and where, on calm September evenings, the round, red setting sun pours a stream of crimson light across the sea, that reaches to the last ripple of the retiring water, like a path of velvet unrolled for the feet of a queen; or, if the wind blow high and fresh, the grand old deep–voiced waves, with their gray locks hanging dishevelled over their broad bosoms, roll gloriously over the rattling pebbles, change for a moment into arcades as white as snow, then dissolve into a wilderness of foam. Thus to make the common things of life so many centres of thought, from which we can travel away to whole worlds of pleasant remembrance, lying calm perhaps in the golden light of lang syne, is one of the profoundest secrets of happiness, and one of the most useful habits we can cultivate. Every one may acquire the art, and it strengthens every day and year that we live. Happiness is not a wonderful diamond, to be sought afar off, but, rightly understood, a thing to be reaped every day out of the ordinary facts of life, even out of the sight of a railway train steaming across the fields.
The plants of the woods and hills bordering the Agecroft valley are mostly the same that are found in Mere Clough. In addition to those above enumerated, may be mentioned the pretty round–leaved marsh–violet, the whortleberry, and the wild cherry, one of the gayest ornaments of the month of May. The whortleberry seldom ripens its fruit at Prestwich, or anywhere so near the town: it seems to require the bracing air of the moors and mountains. It is one of the shrubs which rival the trees in brilliancy of tint, assumed as in the sky, when the hour of departure is at hand. Along with the Canadian medlar, the bramble, and some kinds of azalea, the leaves change not infrequently to vivid crimson. People are apt to call these changes the “fading” of the leaf; it would be better to say the painting. Primroses are exceedingly scarce, both on the Agecroft hills and in the Irwell valley, and their place is unoccupied by any other vernal flower as fair and popular. The wild pansy is there, on the higher and drier ground, and often with remarkably large and handsome flowers, but it makes no show; and though there are daffodils in a few places, they are not prominent to view. A field at the head of Prestwich Dells is for a little time plentifully strewed with their lively yellow. When September comes the want of the primrose is almost compensated by the cheerful autumn crocus, which lifts its purple abundantly among the grass, in the low meadows on the further side of Kersal Moor, near the rivulet; also in the fields below Prestwich Church, the same that in spring are dressed with the daffodil, and again in those between the asylum and the dells. The autumnal crocus, like the colchicum, is curious in seeming to produce its seeds before the flowers, the former being ripe in May and June, whereas the latter do not open till three months after. When the great Swedish botanist, Linnæus, was engaged in promulgating the great doctrine of the sexuality of plants, now about a century and a half ago, the circumstance in question was pointed to as upsetting it. But the young seed–pod lies low down in the bosom of the leaves, where it is fertilised, as in all other flowers, by the pollen from the stamens, and there it abides during the winter, elevating itself above the ground with the warmth of the ensuing summer, when it ripens and scatters its contents. The true time of the vital energy of the autumn crocus is thus, not from May to September, but from September until May. The history has always seemed to us a memorable instance of the quiet dignity with which truth and genuine science pursue their way, triumphing and silencing all the little cavillers in the end, however plausible they may make their case at starting.
Before quitting this beautiful valley it will be salutary to pause for a moment upon its geological history, since, with the single exception of that part of the Mersey valley which lies between Didsbury and Cheadle, it is the newest part of our neighbourhood. The date, that is to say, is the nearest preceding that of the first occupation of the British Islands by mankind. The great ridges of Kinder Scout, Glossop, and Greenfield are immensely more ancient than any of the exposed or superficial parts of the country threaded by the Mersey at Cheadle, and by the Irwell below Prestwich. With the remainder of the chain of hills to which the Greenfield summits belong, those great ridges form the eastern margin of an enormous and very irregular stone basin, tilted up in such a way that the opposite or western edge is concealed far below the surface of the ground, nobody can tell exactly where, but in the direction of the Irish Sea, perhaps under it, far away beyond Southport and the sandhills. It is within or upon the inner surface of this great basin that all the other South Lancashire rocks and strata have their seat. In different portions of its huge lap are deposited the Coal strata (themselves often much elevated above the level on which the deposit took place, and this at various periods); then, in ascending order, there are deposits called “Permian”;[23] above these, in turn, come the Triassic rocks; and over all (except on the higher hill–ranges) there is sand or clay, or gravel, both stratified and unstratified. This last, in the aggregate, is technically termed “Drift.” The whole of this great surface was unquestionably once covered by salt water. At the latest period of that marvellous marine dominion, blocks of ice containing boulders floated in it; and wherever great heaps of sand now occur, we have the remains of ancient beaches or sand–banks, many of which were cut through by the water, while others are charged with pebbles that had been rounded by rolling over and over upon some primeval shore, rattling while on their journeys, just as at Walney Island we may hear the pebbles of to–day. The lofty eastern edges of this great stone basin are, as would be anticipated, quite free from deposits of drift. But everywhere else, westwards, drift covers up all the underlying rock, the latter showing itself only where rivers in cutting their channels have slowly worn it away.
The Agecroft valley participates with all the rest of the district in the possession of drift. Here, however, is well shown, in addition, how the first settlings of gravel and sand often themselves became covered at a later period with yet another new deposit—material brought down and diffused by shallow and tranquil streams, then of considerable breadth, but which in course of time shrank into relatively narrow ones, and continue as such to the present moment. That the lower Irwell, as we have it in the Agecroft valley, was once a broad flood of this description is declared by the “river–terraces” discoverable at intervals all the way up, and which correspond with those that betoken the ancient presence of the waters of the Mersey at a much greater elevation than at present. Abney Hall is built upon one of these river–terraces. Cheadle village stands upon a yet higher and older one.
Peculiarly associated with the valley of the Irwell, and the adjacent cloughs and woods of Stand and Prestwich, is the memory of John Horsefield, one of the most celebrated of the old Lancashire operative botanists. It was Horsefield who first showed us the way through Mere Clough, and pointed out the spots occupied by its rare plants. For thirty–two years he was president and chief stay of the Prestwich Botanical Society, and from 1830, up to the time of his death, president also of the united societies of the whole district. He earned his livelihood as a hand–loom weaver, following that occupation in a cottage at Besses–o’–th’–Barn. Though the small wages his employment yielded him, and the trifling amount of leisure it permitted him to enjoy, naturally hindered pursuit of his darling science so fully as he desired, it is marvellous to see how much he accomplished. In the Manchester Guardian of March 2nd, 1850, in the course of a long and very interesting autobiography, he gives some slight idea of his labours. “Since I first held office as president,” he tells us, “I have attended upwards of four hundred of these general meetings; thousands of specimens have passed through my hands, and all my reward or fee is the privilege of being scot–free.” With that autobiography easily accessible, it is unnecessary to do more here than to point to it, and to a continuation of the narrative in the papers of the April following, which include several pieces of original poetry. Perhaps nothing has ever appeared which shows more strikingly how an indomitable will and ardent thirst for knowledge, and a deep and faithful love of nature, will triumph over the obstacles of poor means and humble station in life, and lift a man into the high places of true science, and give him at once the power of usefulness to his fellow–creatures, and of realising the true rewards of existence. Horsefield was a member of the Banksian Society, but rarely came to the meetings of the Mechanics’ Institution class, reserving himself for those country musters where his knowledge and good nature had the full wide scope which they at once merited and deserved. In person he was thin and spare, presenting a great contrast to the tall and patriarchal figure of Crozier, partaking, however, so far as we had opportunities of judging, of all his amiable, unsophisticated qualities.
