THE

A MANCHESTER SUBURB.

"A jolly place," said he, " in times of old;
But something ails it now."

-W. W. Hart Leap Well.

HE district on the northern side of Manchester which I have in mind in writing these notes is not strictly a suburb, as it occupies certain lands high above the city. I had thought to call it rather a super-urb, or following philologic analogy superb, but refrained in fear of scoffers from the lowlands.

And again, the word suburb would seem to be a misnomer for this district, since although its denizens are held by many genteel citizens to be "rank outsiders "-of which more anon--it has now a legal attachment to the city as one of its Wards.

But in any case it must be admitted that its characteristic features have never been, and are not now, suburban. Cowper speaks of:

A

Suburban villas, highway-side retreats,

That dread th' encroachment of the growing streets;
Tight boxes newly sash'd, and in a blaze.

With all a July sun's collected rays;

Delighting citizens who gasping there,

Breathe clouds of dust, and call it country air.

These traits are not ours. With us the only "highwayside retreats are the hostels on the main road, the "tight boxes" we occupy are usually figurative ones, and our chief reason for gasping is not the dust, but the keenness of the air we breathe, in our high places. However, whether city or suburb, suburbans or citizens, there are features of both place and people which, before they fade entirely away, may be considered worth recording.

To begin with the place. A hundred years ago, a wayfaring visitor from Manchester would go alongside the swift, clear stream of the River Irk, and passing "Tinker's Gardens "-then, as Sam Bamford in his "Early Days" calls it, "A sweet bowery place "--he would ascend by the red sand-stone kopjes of Collyhurst to find himself on a high table land, grooved by many water courses, and otherwise diversified by grassy mounds and hollows of varied and often graceful contour.

Looking over this undulating plain, he would see several ancient halls, a few farms, a well-dispersed sprinkling of cottages, and beyond them in the distance, an almost continuous mass of dark woodlands, stretching from east to west.

Plunging into this wide belt of forest trees, chiefly of oaks, and still steadily ascending, he would come again to the open day on the brink of a deep cleft-almost a canon-the "Boggart Hole Clough" of our present times; crossing which with some difficulty, owing to the shifting sand and the thick undergrowth, he would climb up to the level of the historic White Moss of Chartist days, to distinguish-what is still notable there--a special sharpness and purity in the air.

From favourable points he would, as he proceeded, be able to see picturesquely-situated villages, hamlets, and

folds (or "fowts"), some of which have since grown into great towns, and he would specially note the quaint wooden belfry of Middleton, the tree-crowned "Druidhaunted fire hills of Tandle" and Thornham, the park lands of Heaton, and the grand "old woodlands of Bowlee." To the right his view would be shut in by the rugged and wind-swept heights of Alphian and Oaderman,--fitting foot-stools for the "Seats of the Mighty" beyond,-whilst "cheerless Knowl" and heathery Holcombe would close the prospect towards the West.

Then turning his face homeward where "the broad heaths of Moston lay silent and dun" before him just as they did in the time of "The Wild Rider" of Lancashire romance, he would mark over them the dark furrow, with its background of dense foliage, of the "Great Clough "— as it was then called-from its beginning at Nuthurst, to its end in the Irk Valley. Inclining his course southeastwards, to avoid crossing it again, he could then find his way," pike it eawt," as natives would say,--by bridle paths or pack horse tracks leading to, and along the Moss Brook, and so reach the lower Irk and the town again.

He would, in making this round, have traversed a land of great variety in form, soil, culture, tenure and occupation, offering to him most, if not all, of the rural delights which we have now to go abroad, or afar, to obtain, and yet he would not have gone beyond what are the present bounds. of the City of Manchester. And even in our own day many of these can still be enjoyed in that part of the district,a veritable rus in urbe,-lying beyond the "Great Clough," where the changes in place and people have been remarkably few, but of this I will speak later.

The area bounded by the Moss Brook, the Clough, and the Irk is now largely covered with paved streets of small houses in long uniform rows, the water courses have been