A Beautiful Place (seventh letter to Lowri)

The most beautiful place I know in Manchester is Broad Ees Dole nature reserve, between Sale Water Park and the River Mersey. On Wednesday afternoon I walked there and ended up staying there until 7pm. I walked along Bridgewater Canal, turning off at the path that doubles back under the canal and tramway and leads to Stretford Ees. There I headed across “A Field In England” which is what I call the grassy field between the footpath running alongside the tramway and the Mersey, because it reminds me of the film of that name which I watched shortly after moving to Streford. Crickets were making enough leg rubbing racket to almost drown the rumble of the trams. Electric blue dragonflies hovered and butterflies fluttered in the tall grass. At the pond in the corner a moorhen scuttled into the water, looking like it was running on water. Maybe it was a Jesus moorhen. I climbed over the damaged fence and got onto the river path, following it back to the footbridge and tram bridge where I could turn right back to Stretford or left to Sale Water Park or follow the Mersey upstream. I took the high path upstream, and this is where there are three openings to footpaths through Broad Ees Dole. All but the signed path are hard to spot, and even that isn’t obvious, so I hardly ever see anyone in there. The people who do walk there often stop and talk, like we’re part of some special club who know a secret place. Inside Broad Ees Dole is thick woodland and the trees shelter the animals from the hot sun. I’ve seen a stoat darting about there in the past, but this time the only mammal I saw was a squirrel. Soon there will be small brown frogs crawling about and I’ll have to watch my step to avoid squashing them. It’s quite marshy there but the muddy ground had turned hard from the heatwave so it was possible to walk to parts normally inaccessible, and I found a huge fallen tree with roots exposed and a little grotto where the tree cover was lighter and the sun shone through turning the leaves bright green. The stagnant water nearby had attracted clouds of mosquitos, and one bite on my right arm is about the size of a peach stone! If it wasn’t for the mosquitos I could have stayed there for hours, looking at a different view of natural beauty each time I turned my head. I always lose sense of time there and spend much longer than I thought I had listening to the birds singing, the wind rustling the leaves and the distant drone of the cars on the motorway. There are always a few reminders of human activity, but I take a plastic bag and pick up all the litter. I am the bane of future archaeologists. When I first cleared the litter a few years ago there were a lot of very old cans full of earth and I made them into a pyramid near the signed entrance. I pinned a note to the sign explaining that it was art installation. It was literally a pile of garbage, and that might have been what I called it, but I don’t remember. The most interesting thing for me was seeing how long it would stay there before someone destroyed it. Some of the cans in the pyramid had been dropped a long time ago as they had old style corporate logos. In the end it took a few months before all the cans were kicked down. I really didn’t expect it to last that long, and the writing on the note had faded completely before the pyramid was toppled. I gathered the strewn cans, washed them in the Mersey and put them in a recycling bin. As I walked back downstream along the Mersey, a heron flew over making a loud squawk. I picked up all the litter I saw on my way home. I stopped at the side of the canal to watch a mother duck and seven tiny ducklings nibbling at moss, then on the far bank of the canal I saw something I’d never seen before in Manchester: a nightingale. What a rare bird!