Simon English
England Revisited

On a stone wall on Knowl Moor. 4 miles N.W. of Rochdale.

On a sheep wire post cresting the same wall as 1971.

The stream takes the same course winding through the dry stone wall where, at one time, special flood gates allowed the water through but contained the sheep. The wall is well built, in good condition and sheep proof except for a six yard stretch that has collapsed apparently due to the slow undercutting of the bank by the stream and the resulting solifaction. Here the gap has been filled with a wooden and wire fence.

The view south is almost identical to how it was then. The farm buildings on the road are still a silhouette in the silver surface of the Ashworth Moor Reservoir. This is a public house, (Mother Huff?) around which a few trees have now been grown to give a bit of shelter, from the north, in this most exposed position.

On the horizon can be seen the office block and roofscape skyline of Salford and Manchester. In the middle ground, unseen in the haze, much has changed including the building of a whole ganglion of motorways.

Uphill and on the top of the moor to the north the heather and abandoned farms may be the same but from this rises a very modern development of dozens of three bladed wind turbines that make up a big wind farm. The noisy whop-whop in the air of these huge constructions are a great draw for day trippers and hikers who walk up onto the moors and get a very different feel of the country to the empty moors of decades ago. This is just another stage in the fact that the countryside is an evolving industrial environment. Mines, mills, water, sheep now wind just different ways of harnessing the environment.
Point 28