Barton Moss night soil.

Eccles and Patricroft Journal 1975

Manchester owns 1,200 acres of Eccles.

 

The largest landowner in Eccles apart from Salford council is Manchester city council.

This puzzling fact came to the attention of the Journal when it was discovered that almost the whole of Barton Moss belongs to Manchester city council.

 

Mr Bryan Eaton, the Manchester city estates and valuation officer, told the Journal that the whole of Barton Moss was bought by the Corporation shortly before the turn of the (20th) century. Because of the nature of the land at the time it was a suitable location for the tipping of nightsoil.

 

Unfortunately records of the sale of this large piece of land could not be easily traced in the archives of the corporation so we cannot say exactly how much was paid for the land or the exact date of the transaction.

 

It appears, however, that the land came into the hands of Manchester not long after the Manchester Ship Canal was completed which tends to suggest that it was probably somewhere around the mid 1890s.

What we do know is that the total acreage of the moss belonging to Manchester is about 2,500. Of that 1,200 - just under half - is inside the boundaries of the old Eccles borough. The other half is in Irlam.

 

Once Manchester bought the land, business began to boom. Employment was brought into the area and records still in existence show that at times over 150 men were employed working on the estate.

 

The night soil was brought from Manchester down the ship canal on wide barges. The barges took the night soil as far as Boysnope Wharf where it was unloaded and transferred to trains pulled by steam engines. The trains took the night soil all over the moss.

Sheds and workshops were built at Boysnope Wharf to accomodate men and machines and they still stand today (but not in 2018). In fact one of the sheds still houses the remaining estate workers. When the dumping of the night soil first started the whole of the moss was a depression in the land. It would be an impossible task to estimate the thousands of tons of night soil dumped.

 

As the dumping of the night soil moved to new locations on the moss, the land was reclaimed for agricultural use and the corporation let sections to farmers. Dumping ceased in the area as late as the last war, but most of the land had been let to farmers many years before then.

 

Until the re-organisation of local government in April the moss was the responsibility of the cleansing department, but it has now come under the jurisdiction of the city estates and valuation office.

 

Today the 1,200 acres in Eccles are farmed by about 18 farmers with farms ranging from 10-300 acres in size.

 

Because of the high concentration of peat in the soil, the land is particularly suited to crops rather than dairy farming. In fact all the farms on the moss are arable farms. The main crops are wheat maize, barley, potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower and salads. The moss is not top grade land, but it is fertile.

 

It is a strange paradox to have an area of land still used for farming in an industrial area like Eccles, but the geologists give a simple answer, and that is that you cannot build safely on peat.

 

This problem arose when the builders of the M63 motorway built Barton high level bridge. The peat in places was measured as being 30ft deep and the foundations of the bridge had to be sunk into solid ground below this level.

 

A few places on the moss were found safe to build on, such as the plot where Makro now stands, but for the time being at least the greater part of the moss looke like remaining a green area in a mass of grey.

 

Night soil - for those fortunate enough not to know - was collected at night by horse and cart from the thousands of non-flush back-yard lavatories in the area which were then known as night soil closets. Hence the Lancashire expression for getting up early: "Out before the streets were aired."

 

Image: Night soil train.

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