Cheshire

As it was nice and warm this morning we went looking for dragonflies and damselflies around Newchurch Common. The main objective was to find the Downy Emerald ( Cordulia aenea ), and there were plenty of them flying close to the Whitegate Way between Gull Pool and Shemmy Moss. One of the few that landed long enough for a photograph was this male example.

I have always thought that the Brinnington railway bridge over the M60 motorway is a particularly fine structure. This Warren girder bridge is the largest single span structure of this type on British railways. Wikipedia says: The Warren type girder combines strength with economy of materials and can therefore be relatively light. Patented in 1848 by its designers James Warren and Willoughby Theobald Monzani, its structure consists of longitudinal members joined only by angled cross-members, forming alternately inverted equilateral triangle-shaped spaces along its length, ensuring that no individual strut, beam, or tie, is subject to bending or torsional straining forces, but only to tension or compression.

A happy afternoon exploring an old abandoned stone quarry yielded lots of old machinery quietly rusting and rotting away. Here two crushers sit side-by-side, both made by Robert Broadbent & Son Ltd., Phoenix Ironworks, Stalybridge. On the right is a jaw crusher of the Blake's patent type for primary crushing of larger pieces of rock. To the left is a roll crusher designed to break smaller pieces of rock down to cubes for roads and paths etc. I thing that the remains below the crushers might have included some form of rotary screen but the decay of the various parts made it difficult to be sure.

North Western in service. One of the 1962 Leyland Leopards with 36ft Alexander body stands outside the Plaza in Mersey Square, Stockport. It is in dual-purpose livery and could well be on the 27 service to Buxton. Another of my home developed shots taken with my dad's camera.

Bakestonedale Moor above Pott Shrigley has seen an extensive coal mining industry over the past 2-300 years. The last coal and fireclay extraction took place in the mid 1960's before the Peak Park planners put a stop to it. The nineteenth century workings left a number of deep shafts which remained open until the 1970's when they were capped by the then National Coal Board leaving distinctive concrete obelisks on the shaft top.

The Macclesfield Canal once had many boathouses along its top level between Marple and Bosley. With the changes in the type of pleasure boat used on the canals from small wooden or fibreglass cruisers to steel hulled narrowboats these boathouses have mainly been abandoned and demolished. Whilst there are still several remaining on the High Lane Arm, this is the last survivor on the main line and is steadily falling into decay. Another bit of history rotting away. :-(

There are just a few remains around USAAF Station 571 at Poynton, Cheshire, adjacent to the now defunct Woodford Airfield. This is a sanitary block type B, flanked by anti- tank cylinders of which there are many dotted around the site. The site was occupied by United States personnel from July 1942, and was used as a dispersal area for stores from Burtonwood AAF 590. The site is now an industrial estate.

Boundary stone between Sutton and Gawsworth parishes hiding behind the towpath boundary hedge on the Macclesfield Canal. This suddenly caught my eye whilst walking this morning and was a complete surprise as it is not marked on any maps that I have seen. There is a similar stone on the other side of the canal a bit further north behind Gaw End Farm.

The use of terracotta ornamentation for walls and pillars was common in the late nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century. Much has been replaced or swept away these days, so it was good to find this survivor in Mill Lane, Hyde. There had been more along the block but this was the sole survivor. A look at the wall further along showed that the bricks were from the Black Hill Brick Co Ltd Entwistle Bolton Lancashire but that may not be the source of the decorative pieces.

The limekilns and the chimneys of the CHP plant are reflected in the dragonfly pond at Anderton Nature Park.

Currently there are two bridges between Runcorn and Widnes over the Mersey estuary. On the right in this view from the Widnes bank is the railway bridge of 1868, whilst to the left is the through arch road bridge that was completed in 1961. The road bridge replaced the 1905 transporter bridge that was off to the left. Another road bridge is now planned a bit further upstream in order to relieve congestion on the existing structure.

On a fine sunny day BITH* and I took a stroll through the PQ (Philadelphia Quartz) Corporation plant adjacent to the Mersey at Warrington. This was once the Crosfield's soap works and today it continues to produce inorganic chemicals.

Equipment for the early stages of the process at Robinson's brewery in Stockport.

Compstall Co-operative Industrial Society Limited, Marple Bridge Branch of 1892. The building has now been converted to apartments.

In the 1830s Thomas Andrew erected cotton spinning mills on the River Etherow at Compstall. To supply a suffcient head of water for the wheels that powered the mills the Etherow was dammed with a great weir about three-quarters of a mile up river from Compstall bridge and the site of the mill, and a canal-sized leat was built alongside the river. This sickle shaped weir is thirty feet high and stepped. Originally built of bricks, it has had to be repaired from time to time with concrete. Originally there were slots to set boards along the top to raise the water level even higher. Demand for water to power the mills was so great that the extensive reservoirs adjacent to the mills and the river above the weir were often drained by the end of a day's working. Today the weir and leat remain along with most of the mill buildings, whilst the surrounding land has become a Country Park.

On a very cold night a few years ago I set out for a session of night photography around Runcorn and Widnes. The still conditions were ideal for reflections and the cold meant that I wasn't disturbed by unwelcome visitors whilst making the shots. This is the classic view of the road and rail bridges between Runcorn and Widnes over the Mersey estuary. The old transporter bridge was until 1961 just in front of where I was standing.

This example is probably a wyvern rather than a dragon and is lurking on a rooftop in Macclesfield. This looks to be a fairly recent example rather than one of the Victorian examples which are generally of better quality detail.

A view of the swingbridge remains from the footbridge over the Macclesfield Canal in Lyme Handley, south of Poynton. The construction of a footbridge as well as a swing bridge in this rural location is a bit of a mystery. The Macclesfield Canal was never so busy that the walker would have been waiting for very long before the bridge was swung back to allow them to continue on their way. The field beyond the hedge is filled with coal workings and there is a shaft off to the left alongside the canal, so there would probably have been a certain amount of coal traffic across the swingbridge in the early years of the canal, but this would have petered out by the end of the 1830s. The swingbridge remained in use until 1971 when it was summarily removed by British Waterways.