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IF you look at this picture in the same
way you would view one of those old ultra-wide school photographs -
that is, with the left-hand side looking north-west and the
right-hand side towards east - you will be able to get your bearings
on this widescreen view of the Weir Pool. That is, a panorama of 135
degrees or so.
The Weir what ? Like me,
you might know this area as The Willows, a name that goes back many
decades. But it now seems to be the thing to use the name Weir Pool
- accurate enough, but not so poetic.
The trouble is that we have
many willows in the riverside area now - the new Nantwich Riverside
Project people are growing a lot more of the trees for
basket-weaving purposes, etc - and so it is perhaps not right for
one particular area to hog the name.
In my childhood, this area
was popular with youngsters enjoying sunny school summer holidays
splashing about in the water. Mind you, the polio epidemic of the
1950s/'60s didn't do much for its popularity (water was a source of
the polio virus).
After taking the lakeside
and riverbank pictures for this
page, I realised I had omitted the picturesque area just below the
weir which created the mill pool, or at least which provided the old corn
mill with its motive power.
To me, there has always
been a bridge over the weir and so I was surprised to hear, the
other day, that the bridge had been removed by the 1980s. But
it is back now as part of an enhancement of the River Weaver valley.
And I am pleased that a new path on Mill Island - as a by-pass route
for the use of Millfields Estate residents when the old mill site is
the venue of the Nantwich Food Festival, etc - follows the route of
the old path across the riverside area that I used daily as a young man.
Previously the bridge was reached across the grass on Mill Island.
For those who remember the
area, these pictures capture how it looks now. |
