The nights are now drawing in and with this in mind it was a short trip tonight along the Bury arm of the canal travelling towards Bury , this was extremely muddy with many large puddles making it quite enjoyable reliving our boyhood years splashing through the puddles. Shortly we arrived at the bridge over the canal at Ladyshore, here we left the towpath and went along the cobbled road (which is still in really good condition if a little over grown, this in fact was commented on by Graham that the road was in better condition than the tarmac roads now), At the top of this road just to the right is a viewing platform that looks over the site of the old bleach works.
The path here dropped away steeply, this provided a great downhill ride right to the base of the hill, Graham descending first due to him being the more audacious of us.
Reaching the base of the hill we bore left along a path which took us out along the bank of the river near the weir which was used to divert water into reservoirs for the bleach works, here we found an area of the river which was a bank of pebbles, not resisting this opportunity we decided to “skim some pebbles”.
This proved to be quite competitive until the inevitable happened throwing large bricks etc. Playtime over we noticed the stanchions for a bridge over the river, the bridge itself is long gone , but we could see the supports across the river , theseLooking at this we decided the light was now fading too much to explore this further and hopefully will try to explore this next week.
We then followed the bank of the river and came back around to the open area which was the site of the Old Lever Bank Bleach works, reminiscing on the people that would have worked here and then walked back up the hill to the canal heading home, we noticed the light was fading quite fast now and so we followed in their footsteps (albeit on bikes) up the cobbled hill to Ladyshore Bridge, over the bridge we headed alongside the site of the old Ladyshore Colliery and along Ladyshore Road heading home. A short trip out, but never the less an enjoyable adventure.
