A canalside walk

Eccles Water Treatment Works 

Even had it not been such a miserable day I would not have been going far on the trains today. As it was, it has been a miserable day and I wondered what to do with it. A couple of glossy ibises had returned to Eccles Water Treatment Works (how mad is that for the start of a sentence?) so I thought I'd try and get better photographs than I'd managed last time.

I got the train to Irlam. There was a plan B: if the trains were playing up I'd get the 25 to the Trafford Centre and walk up that way. Arriving in Irlam there was a twenty minute wait for the 100 which would drop me off at the Salford Community Stadium for the short walk down. There was only four minutes to wait for the 67, though, and it's only ten minutes' extra walk so I got that. It turned out to work in my favour.

I got off the 67 at Newell Avenue and walked down Liverpool Road to the Greenway. A flock of jackdaws was being very skittish, they'd been disturbed by the arrival of a Chinook helicopter at Barton Aerodrome and as it still had its rotors running they weren't for settling.

Salteye Brook

At the corner where Liverpool Road meets the Greenway there's a triangle of a few acres of wild land by Salteye Brook, which runs into the Ship Canal at Barton Lock. There's nothing that can be done with the land so it's been left to run riot and is now pretty heavily wooded. I hadn't realised when passing on the bus just how many of the trees were apple trees, a product of people lobbing apple cores away in passing. The next waxwing Winter we get I'm heading this way. There's not a lot of the brook you can see from the roadside but I had a look just where it passes under the road and accidentally disturbed a kingfisher. The kingfisher didn't have to fly far to find deep cover to hide in. The mallards on the brook couldn't be bothered.

The pavement disappears after the bus stop but there's a wide grass verge, well, grass and Michaelmas daisies and birch saplings, but there's one of those paths that cats and kids know that winds away from the roadside then comes back to the pillars of the motorway flyover and the roadside beyond. So I followed that, disturbing a lot of craneflies in the process and getting a severe ticking off from great tits and robins amongst the hawthorns and elderberries. I had to walk on the road for the last five yards up to the entrance of the water treatment works because the brambles had got a bit boisterous.

Michaelmas daisies 

I walked along the pavement to get a view of the filtration pans and I let on to another birdwatcher who'd also just arrived. Scanning round it was hard to not get distracted by the black-headed gulls and jackdaws milling around. A dozen or so pied wagtails flitted about, I couldn't see any that might be white wagtails. Crows rummaged on the beds with the jackdaws. Half a dozen mallards swam about in one of the tanks. 

It took about five minutes for me to find the ibises but at least this time I was seeing both of them. They were way over on one of the beds by some shipping containers and I had to do some crouching down to get a view that didn't have a big metal bar hiding their top halves. One bird looked like the one I saw last week, flat matt black, the other had a brownish sheen to it without being glossy, a lot like a very young carrion crow. At that distance it would have been easy to dismiss both as crows at a glance and not bother to take a proper look and see they had long necks and legs. That's a lesson for me to add "crows" to the list of birds I take a second and third look at before getting cocky.

Walking over the bridge I looked downstream to Port Salford where a family of mute swans drifted on the water, black-headed gulls bathed and a heron flew from bank to bank.

There's a reason why I only take this footpath about once every twenty years

I decided I was going to walk down Old Barton Road to Barton Bridge, partly to see what birds were about but also for the nostalgia of remembering what Dumplington was like before the Trafford Centre. Usually when I do this I walk down to Dumplington Circle then back up Barton Embankment to join Old Barton Road. It's all roads with pavements and easy enough to walk. I had a yen, though, to keep walking along the canalside so I took the old footpath past the Travelodge and over to the road. I do this walk about once every twenty years and there's a reason why I do it about once every twenty years as basically it's a hundred yards of barging through a bramble patch. This area was the boundary line between the Viking City of York and the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia and as I disengaged savage lengths of bramble from my body parts I could well understand both parties not wanting a fight over it. You have to respect the naked woad-painted warriors who came before them.

Tutsan

There were plenty of black-headed gulls on the canal. The brambles and balsams were teeming with carder bees and craneflies as well as an assortment of micro-moths that were back under cover almost as quickly as they'd dashed out. A great black-back flew downstream, two dislodged white feathers on its wing reminding me very much of the bird I saw on Latchford Locks the other day. As I emerged into the clearing by the small canal maintenance works building a painted lady fluttered about the faded thistles and St. John's worts. 

Manchester Ship Canal 

I walked over to the canalside, the mute swans, mallards, Canada geese and black-headed gulls were all congregated by the grassy bank on the other side, same as last week. A couple of lesser black-backs loafed on the water with black-headed gulls. A mixed tit flock bounced through the bushes on this bank, the blue tits and great tits keeping under cover, the long-tailed tits and chiffchaffs flitting through the twigs, the chiffchaffs squeaking as they went. One of the juveniles was a spectacularly rich shade of olive yellow with almost an orange cast to its underparts but wasn't for having its photograph taken.

Old Barton Road 

The short maintenance road was the more sensible option to reach Old Barton Road so I took it and walked past St. Catherine's Churchyard, with its woodpigeons and magpies, to Barton Bridge then walked over to the Trafford Centre for the bus home. I was wet through and scratched to pieces but it had been a good walk and like I said the other day, I'm still not blasé about glossy ibises.

Journey into mystery

What I'd thought were three parakeets in the trees behind the clinic turned out to be eighteen of the beggars. I'm not fond, and neither were the spadgers when they did a flying visit to the back garden.

I headed for Llandudno, hoping to connect with the dotterel that's been gracing the Great Orme.

It was a thin old time as the train trundled through Chat Moss and Cheshire. A flock of pigeons disturbed from the bridge over the Weaver at Frodsham and a few dozen rooks near Helsby were like oases in the desert. We were a long time at Chester Station waiting for the go-ahead into Wales. We then had to decamp an overcrowded Holyhead train to join another even more badly overcrowded Holyhead train. Luckily, I noticed that the next train straight to Llandudno was also stuck at the station so I walked over and got that. It, too, wasn't getting anywhere but had seats free to sit on. For a while. Otherwise I was for giving up. Fifteen minutes later we were told to decamp and get the train I came in on. Half an hour after that I gave up and got the train back to Manchester. It would have been teatime before I arrived anywhere. I hear there are places in the world where travel by public transport isn't an unpredictable adventure with no guarantee of success, how tiresome for them.

I could and should have waited for a train stopping at Frodsham so I could retrieve something of the day but as they were all stuck in Wales it wasn't really an option.

The clouds rolled in after a bright, sunny morning. It was thin pickings on the way home but a flock of black-headed gulls on a playing field in Dallam brought some light into the gloom.

All in all a crap start to the month. Still, what can we expect? After more than forty years of active disinvestment in national infrastructure so the bookies' runners in the city can extract the investment capital and cache it offshore the waterways will be full of shit and the trains won't run on time. Then we'll be told by the powers that be that it's all the fault of poor people trying to escape the wars and environmental disasters our governments have contributed so much towards, them poor devils will be to blame for the rich lads' asset-stripping and nothing working anymore. It makes me cross.

Summer drapery 2026

Looking down the Medlock Valley 

It would be nice to have an extended happy medium somewhere between Coo, What A Scorcher! and Britain Shivers! The prolonged dry spell and a succession of heatwaves had their impact on the landscapes. It also had an impact on which landscapes I explored: heat and wildfires knocked a lot of hillwalking on the head.

Whatever the weather, and the changing climate, the scenery is worth the effort of the visit, most of the time. Don't think I've never been tempted to put together a sewage works gallery.

New Cut, Woolston

River Irwell, Kersal Wetlands 

Crosby Marine Lake 

River Irwell, Kersal Dale 

River Mersey, Urmston

Chat Moss 

Welsh Coast Path approaching Foryd Bay 

Caernarfon 

Lower Strinesdale Reservoir 

River Mersey, Woolston 

Low Hall 

Bempton Cliffs

A Stretford Meadows sunset 

Grange-over-sands Station 

Duddon Estuary

Hodbarrow, Black Combe in the distance

Tarlscough Lane, Burscough 

Wellacre Country Park
No, it didn't rain.

Moses Gate Country Park 

Pennington Flash 

Buxton Pavilion Gardens 

Chat Moss

Rixton

Dee Estuary, West Kirby 

Partial solar eclipse, Banky Lane 

Cadishead Moss

Pennington Flash 

Cob Kiln Wood 

Lostock Park 

High Rid Reservoir 

Walkerwood Reservoir 

Woolston Eyes 

Manchester Ship Canal by Wharfside 

Martin Mere

Canada geese, mallards, black-headed gulls, ruff and lapwings

Short, heavy showers were forecast for the morning and short, heavy showers are what we got. I sat at Bolton Station waiting for the Southport train, sheets of water pouring onto the platform and I asked myself not for the first time, and certainly not the last, why I do this to myself. I was heading for Martin Mere and I hoped the production of a fine but cloudy afternoon was going to be as accurate as the morning's forecast.

Along Red Cat Lane 

As I got off the train at Burscough Bridge a cloud of jackdaws and rooks blew into town leaving the fields just beyond empty. Walking down Red Cat Lane in the rain there were plenty of woodpigeons about but little else until I got to the approach to Curlew Lane, starlings massing on the telegraph wires, and swallows and house martins hawking low overhead. The stubble fields were dotted with suddenly alert heads as I passed by. Most were woodpigeons, one was a cock grey partridge. I looked in vain for the rest of the covey, they'll have been there but crouching low and looking more like stubble than the stubble did. A couple of tree sparrows cheeped and disappeared into the hedgerow, a flock of house sparrows chivvied me on my way.

Martin Mere 

The rain stopped, I got to Martin Mere, sat down in the Discovery Hide and looked out at an almost empty mere. Six shovelers dabbled by one of the islands and a couple of moorhens pootled across the water. There were Canada geese on the far bank and swallows, sand martins and house martins hawked over the mere. The coots, mallards and teal took a lot of finding in the vegetation on the islands.

The Raines Observatory was empty and at first sight it looked like that end of the mere was, too. I found a few coots and a lapwing on an island but there seemed to be nothing on the bank. Then a green sandpiper flew out of the vegetation and a few yards further along, bobbing its tail as it landed on a rock before skittering back under cover.

From the Mere View Hide 

The Hale Hide was a bird-free zone, the Mere View Hide would also have been but for the distant view of Canada geese and greylags in the fields. Half a dozen migrant hawkers seemed to be hunting as a pack over the brambles in front of the hide.

At the Ron Barker Hide: two pools, one teal

There was literally nothing on either of the pools at the Ron Barker Hide, it was a relief when a teal flew in. Squadrons of woodpigeons set out across the fields to the distant woodlands. Way over to the right of the marsh, half a dozen whooper swans grazed in the long grass and beyond them a dozen or so cattle egrets fussed around the longhorn cattle. Whooper swans and cattle egrets, so typical of an August day in Lancashire.

Walking back from the Ron Barker Hide 

Longhorn cattle, cattle egrets and Canada geese 

I walked back and headed for the United Utilities Hide to have a better look at those geese. There was something white in the mix and I was curious as to what it was. What it was was uncooperative, a white farm goose keeping deep in a patch of tall grass and sedges so as to make it difficult to even work out its size, let alone any details. At one point I wondered if it was two of the cattle egrets that were with the cattle at the edge of the field. Frustrating though that was, the three pink-footed geese on the edge of the flock made themselves nicely conspicuous. A passing marsh harrier provoked raised heads and mutters amongst the geese. A buzzard flying in and joining them while it dug for worms didn't raise a feather.

Cuckoo pint berries

The United Utilities Hide had been deserted. The Harrier Hide was packed to capacity. And so was the pool in front of it. Mallards, gadwalls, lapwings, ruffs and black-headed gulls jostled for space amongst the Canada geese at the water's edge while great crested grebes, dabchicks and tufted ducks bobbed about on the water.

At the Gordon Taylor Hide 

The sun hinted at poking through the cloud. The reedbed walk would have been very quiet but for family groups of greylags flying low over to the fields and a Cetti's warbler singing by the Rees Hide. The pools by the hides were still just damp water meadows.

Winter Hill from Red Cat Lane 

I walked back to Burscough Bridge, stopping for a cup of tea at Brandeth Barn and feeling the better for it. The fields were busy with woodpigeons, rooks and jackdaws and the hedgerows busy with house sparrows. Every farmstead had its pair of collared doves. It had been an odd sort of a day's birdwatching but not unproductive.