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'Chat Moss' is a large area of peat bog that makes up some 30% of the City of Salford, in Greater Manchester, England.^[1] It is situated north of the River Irwell, to the west of Manchester and occupies an area of about . In places, particularly in the central hollow, the peat is around deep.
Chat Moss, as it might be recognised today, is thought to be about 7,000 years old, but peat development seems to have begun there with the ending of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago.
A great deal of work was carried out, particularly during the 19th century, to reclaim large areas of Chat Moss. The bog threatened the completion of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, until George Stephenson succeeded in constructing a railway line through it in 1829, which "floated" on a wood and stone foundation. The M62 motorway, completed in 1976, also crosses the moss, to the north of Irlam.
Much of Chat Moss is now prime agricultural land, although farming has been in decline in the area in recent years. A large scale network of drainage channels is still required to keep the land from reverting to bog.

Contents

History

Reclamation

Geography

Present day

References

See also

History

Chat Moss may be named after St Chad, a 7th century bishop of Mercia, but as it was long ago part of a great tree-edged lake, as evidenced by the numerous wood remains in the lower levels of the peat, it is perhaps more likely that the name stems from the Celtic word ''cêd'', meaning wood.
Daniel Defoe visited the area in 1724, on his way from Warrington to Manchester, and had this to say about it:
It is not unknown for peat bogs to burst their boundaries, particularly after being subjected to heavy rainfall, and this seems to have happened with Chat Moss in the 16th century. John Leland, writing during the reign of King Henry VIII, described one such event:

Reclamation

View of the Railway across Chat Moss, 1833

The beginning of the 19th century saw the first attempt at the reclamation of Chat Moss. In 1793, William Roscoe had begun work on reclaiming the much smaller Trafford Moss, now part of Trafford Park. By 1798 that work was sufficiently advanced for Roscoe to enter into a lease of Chat Moss with the Trafford family, but for various reasons no reclamation work was carried out until 1805.^[2]
Reclamation methods varied somewhat during the 19th century, but three basic operations featured; constructing drains at appropriate intervals; building a system of roads to allow access to the land so that materials such as clay, lime or marl could be dumped on it, to give it body; and fertilising the land by adding manure, often in the form of the euphemistically named night soil, collected from neighbouring towns.
The reclamation of both Chat Moss and Trafford Moss was innovative in that instead of constructing roads to give access for the material to be dumped onto the bog, a movable light railway was developed. Narrow gauge track was temporarily laid down and then picked up and relaid elsewhere as needed, which allowed the weight of the wagons to be spread evenly across an area of the bog. The system allowed one man to pull as much material as could be carried by a cart with a driver and two horses.²
Roscoe was declared bankrupt in 1821, but the reclamation work continued under the stewardship of others who took over his leasehold interest, amongst them William Baines, the anti Corn Law MP and owner of the ''Leeds Mercury'' newspaper.²
Between 1831 and 1851, the population of nearby Manchester increased by more than 150%. This put considerable pressure on refuse disposal, a problem excacerbated by the gradual switch from the 1870s onwards from the older cesspit methods of sewage disposal to pail closets, which required regular emptying. By the 1880s Manchester was producing more than 200,000 tons of refuse annually, about 75% of that being night soil. In 1895, Manchester Corporation purchased Chat Moss from Sir Humphrey de Trafford, with a view to using the moss as a refuse disposal site. Refuse was carried on barges down the Manchester Ship Canal as far as Boysnope Wharf, where it was loaded onto a light railway system to be taken into the moss for dumping.
Farmers on Chat Moss were legally required by their tenancy agreements to accept a specified amount of refuse on their land, and were even obliged to pay for it. Farmers could themselves undertake reclamation work, with the land reclaimed being incorporated into their tenancies. An agreement dated 1905, between Manchester Corporation and Plant Cottage Farm, shows that the Corporation agreed to supply 300 tons of refuse per acre free of charge for the first year, with the tenant being obliged to accept 12 tons of refuse per acre each year thereafter. The dumping of night soil on Chat Moss ended in 1923, but general refuse continued to be dumped on a diminishing scale until it finally ended in 1966.²
Once drained, stabilised and fertilised, Chat Moss became prime agricultural land, supplying Manchester with salad and vegetables. The drainage channels, still required today, give the area its distinctive flat landscape broken up by ditches instead of hedges or walls.¹

Geography

Chat Moss is located at the southern edge of the Lancashire Plain, an area of Bunter sandstones overlaid with marls laid down during the Late Triassic period. Those rocks are themselves overlaid by a layer of boulder clay, deposited during the last ice age. The combination of the flat topography and the underlying clay has resulted in extensive peat bogs developing along the Mersey Valley, and overflowing beyond the valley, as in the case of Chat Moss.
The moss occupies an area of approximately , and is about long, about across at its widest point, lying above sea level. In places, particularly in the central hollow, the peat is around deep. Late-glacial deposits at Bagmere, Cheshire, and Chat Moss, Lancashire, , H J B, Birks, New Phytologist,

Present day

Even today parts of this area are still surprisingly remote and bleak, especially in the locality of Woolden Hall. The majority of the area is now Green Belt, placing restrictions on the kinds of developments that can take place.
Farming on Chat Moss has been in decline over recent years, mainly because of the increased competition from mass producers of agricultural products and the reluctance of supermarkets to buy from small local suppliers. In 2003 it was reported that of the 54 farms on the moss, occupying , almost half the area of the bog, only three were still growing vegetables.^[3] Many farms had turned to arable farming, turf growing or horse livery instead of the traditional salad and vegetable crops.
Part of the area to the north of the railway line, notified as 'Astley & Bedford Mosses', was designated as a site of special scientific interest in 1989 for its biological interest. There are areas of commercial peat extraction on Chat Moss, and Salford is seeking to return at least some of those back to wet mossland.
In 1994, the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who was born in Salford, wrote a seven minute tone poem for school orchestra, titled ''Chat Moss''. Chat Moss was also the subject of a large ceiling painting produced as a result of a research project at The University of Nottingham, exhibited in 2004. Derek Hampson and Gary Priestnall chose Chat Moss for their subject because its flat, relatively featureless landscape, made it an unusual subject to be depicted in art.^[4]

References

1. Living IN Salford
2. Manchester's Narrow Gauge Railways: Chat Moss and Carrington Estates, , Robert, Nicholls, Narrow Gauge Railway Society, 1985,
3. Go organic and save farms plea
4. Project brings together art and science

See also

★ List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Greater Manchester