The View
I’m walking through the city that is the beating heart of the River Mersey. And no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of…
THE RIVER MERSEY. What could be more emblematically Liverpudlian, more quintessentially Scouse? Merseybeat; Ferry Cross the Mersey; Merseyrail; the Mersey Tunnel. Pete Wylie, voluble front man of local heroes Wah!, even christened his daughter Mersey. It flows through the double helix of the city’s DNA like the choppy waters between the Pier Head and Birkenhead.
How weird, then, to find out that the most beautiful, navigable and most gloriously walkable stretch of this magnificent watercourse flows through (and you should whisper this quietly in Sefton, Toxteth or Dingle)… Manchester.
I have Mick Lynch to thank for this discovery. My always looked-forward-to Saturday afternoon walk after my radio show in Salford was going to be Stoodley Pike above Todmorden, and I will be reporting about this very soon, I hope. But the train strike put paid to that. Manchester’s excellent custard yellow and white trams were still running, though, so a little light Googling helped me to choose a stroll following a curvy blue squiggle on the map from Sale Water Park tram stop to the heart of uber-fashionable Didsbury. That blue squiggle, though (and again with apologies to Fazakerley and Bootle) is the Mersey, born here and (whisper again) most beautiful here.
The Mersey is born from the confluence of the Tame and Goyt rivers in Stockport. It then wends its way through south Manchester before joining the Manchester Ship Canal. When it parts company with that mighty industrial conduit, it flows through Cheshire to Widnes and then heads north for Liverpool. The 22-mile section from Warrington to Liverpool is now a designated longdistance trail, with many highlights. But it can be muddy, overgrown and noisy. Walking the south Manchester stretches, you would never know that the most crowded suburbs of one of the world’s major cities were just a few feet away.
Turn right at the splendid Jackson’s Boat pub (where you’ll struggle to get a table in the garden) and the path to Chorlton Water Park is nice enough. But after this, the walk becomes a really lovely excursion, especially on a fine day. We saw what we thought was a model of a heron on the riverside rocks near Stretford, until a sudden dart of the head revealed a beakful of minnows. Every now and then we glimpsed the traffic of the A5103, but just after the big weir at Northenden, there’s a glorious, wide bend and a shingle beach where you can paddle and skim stones and believe yourself to be somewhere in the Cotswolds; perhaps on the Windrush near Bourton or the Evenlode at Moreton-in-Marsh. (Just with more replica Man City tops and fewer Panama hats and maroon cords.)
After several miles of undemanding riverside strolling, we turned right and away from the Mersey to wander throu
