Victorian façade
There's a special atmosphere on the Edge
I've chosen nine mysteries from the MCR
Area and we get to solve a couple of them, for instance who is the princess after whom princess road was named? others remain unsolved.
On Booth Street, just off Albert Square, there is a Victorian façade, which like many from that era has decorative faces carved into the stone. But one of the faces is different. It’s a face of a woman and she’s wearing a veil. Her eyes are closed.
It’s a very skilful and realistic piece of sculpture, but who is the woman? Who asked for the veiled lady to be carved and why? It’s a mystery, one that we will probably never find out the answer to, because it’s just a minor detail in the construction of a building that was completed more than a century and a half ago.
The Veiled Lady was introduced to me by Peter from the Manchester Civic Society. If you can shed any light on this mystery, please get in touch via the comments. And now we travel up into North Manchester to a place with a mysterious name. Boggart Hole Clough is a large woodland and urban country park in Blackley. Where does the name Boggart Hole Clough originate? According to the manchesterhistory.net website, a clough is a northern expression for a steep-sided ravine. Actually, it sounds like the Irish cloch, meaning rock. A boggart is a mythological creature sometimes describes a household fairy.
They are thought to live under bridges, next to sharp bends on roads and also in pieces of wild woodland. Mysterious disappearances in the Blackley district have been attributed by some to the Boggarts who live in Boggart Hole Clough. So now you know. And thanks again to manchesterhistory.net for this information! I took some photos here for the Eyewitness in Manchester website many years ago. A passer-by pointed out this strange tree with a hog's head in it. Bizarre. We return to Manchester City centre to revisit another location I wrote about for Eyewitness, namely, the Mancunian Way. And there's one feature of the Mancunian Way which people have speculated about.
It’s an unfinished slip road that extends just for a few metres next to the junction by Brook Street. You could say it's the slip road to nowhere, but, and I'm sure you've been losing sleep over this question, why was it built? I've found out from several sources that the slip road was to have led into Princess Street, but Princess Street was for many years one-way heading south. Only in recent years has it become two-way. The ghost slip road has been cut back to make way for the multi-storey car park from where. I took the first shot. And another thing: Why was the Mancunian way sign upside down when I visited back in 2004? No idea. And so from Princess Street, we go to Princess Road. It’s the main highway south out of Manchester city centre, a wide dual carriageway heading towards the M60, the airport, the M6 and ultimately London.
But why is it called Princess Road? The Wikipedia page says nothing about the origin of the name. In France, you'll often find information under street signs but not here. Could it have been named after Princess Elizabeth, the present Queen? Well, no, because during the reign of her grandfather, she was third in the line of succession to the throne and not expected to become Queen.
Oh, and another puzzling thing.
Why is the junction near Asda very wide, like a junction in North America? It's because this junction was intended to be part of the inner orbital motorway that was never built. Returning to the origin of Princess Road, could it have been named after a certain Princess. Alexandra? Princess Road runs past Alexandra Park and on the other side of Alexandra Park is Alexandra Road. A quick look in Wikipedia provided some information: Alexandra of Denmark was Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress of India from 1901 to 1910 as the wife of King-Emperor Edward VII.
She married Albert. Edward, Prince of Wales in 1863 and the park was opened in 1870. So Alexandra Park, Alexandra. Road and Princess Road were named after her. And that's confirmed by the Alexandra park website. In the 19th century, Princess Road was a short, narrow section of road leading to the park. But in the 1920s it was widened and extended south. The new Princess Road was opened in February 1932.
And by the way south of the Mersey it's Princess Parkway. People often get that wrong. They call the whole of Princess Road Princess Parkway. We really ought to have a better idea of who our roads are named after! So, a mystery solved. A short distance from Princess Road is Platt Fields Park and right in the middle of the park, not far from the boating lake, behind a fence and some bushes you will find a stone. What’s written on the stone? Nowadays it’s not easy to make out, so let’s look at the photograph I took back in October 2004 for Eyewitness and it states part of the very ancient Mickle or Great Ditch, sometimes called Nico Ditch well-known A.D. 1200 extending over 5 miles from here to Ashton Moss and bounding several townships described fully in volume 23 of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society. But who was Nico? A German singer who sang with the Velvet Underground and lived for a while in south Manchester in the 1980s? No, not her.
Why does the ditch begin or seem to begin just here in Platt Fields Park and why does it end somewhere near Ashton? What exactly was it used for? I wonder what the landscape south of Manchester looked like at the time. It’s difficult to visualise but there is no doubt that. Nico Ditch will continue to be an intriguing feature on the landscape of south Manchester. So let’s go back to Princess Road or shall we say Princess Alexandra Road and turn right onto Mauldeth Road, another of Manchester's wide dual carriageways with a tree-lined central reservation. It's as wide and important-looking as Princess Road and Kingsway, but where does it lead? The final section is the big wide Hardy Lane in Chorlton but there it comes to a dead end. The explanation? There was to have been a Hardy Lane extension across the Mersey to the town of Sale and that would have been a major thoroughfare in Manchester. But it was never built. The Metrolink runs along the planned route and crosses the.
Mersey further up on its way to the airport. So the route is actually used today just by trams. The planning process seems to be so haphazard and uncoordinated, but it makes us wonder about the Manchester that might have been if these projects have gone ahead. You can walk or cycle across the river to Sale via Jackson's Bridge. Not far up the River Mersey from here is the ancient Cheshire village of Northenden, which has been part of the city of Manchester since 1931.
It’s called Northenden because it’s in the
North of cheshire "north enclosure".
Like other Cheshire villages it has picturesque
Houses and an ancient church.
In the 20th century, this area was redeveloped as a low-rise residential district.
And so it will always remain a complete and utter mystery to me why planning permission was given for the construction of this building. Out of scale and out of character with its surroundings, actually it's quite a good and striking modern building but it needs to be in the right setting, maybe a new development with other modern buildings, not in an ancient Cheshire village. So n ow let’s move to another part of ancient Cheshire, since 1974 in Greater Manchester, it’s. Werneth Low to the south-east of the city. There are fantastic views over the entire conurbation. It was Martin Zero on his excellent channel who drew my attention to this mystery. I'd never noticed that there is something very strange about the telephone box. No, it’s not the fact that it now contains an emergency defibrillator, a great new use that can save lives.
No, it’s the strange inscription on the phone box, where the word 'telephone' used to be. TEJRJWNE and it uses the same serif font, it looks like 'Times'. Martin's article was made in April 2018. The inscription is unchanged. Can anyone offer an explanation? Our final Manchester mystery can be found on another hill, this time located to the south of Manchester. It’s Alderley Edge, well known as a place of mystery, imagination and myth, made famous in the novels of Alan Garner. There are fantastic views. We can see the towers of Deansgate Gardens exactly 20 kilometres or 12 miles to the north, but the entire Edge is full of strange clues pointing to a mysterious past.
Pipistrelle bats like to hang out here. But the true mystery is further down the footpath. It’s quite muddy so wear suitable shoes. Inscribed into an overhanging rock are some words and if you look above the words, you’ll find a face that’s been carved into the stone. It’s the face of the wizard! The inscription states: "Drink of this and take thy fill, for the water falls by the wizard's will." A water trough below collects rainwater. I took a few drops into my hand for good luck. This mysterious face shows signs of weathering, maybe it needs sprucing up.
It is said that the face was carved to create a bit of mystery and attract visitors to the Edge, but who carved it. Any ideas? And thanks to the ludchurch blog for information and photos about Alderley Edge. So that’s it. I hope you found this article of interest, maybe even inspiring.