I worked this out before my earlier posts, but have only just got round to scanning the pages of my sketches!
Having decided to look at the rivers in Glossop and use the images of these as my vehicle for the assignment, I started to plan the locations I needed to communicate my objectives.
I approached this as a storyboard, describing the path the rivers take from the hills, through the town and out onto the plain and to the conurbation of Manchester in the distance. The sketches are from memory and serve me as an aide-memoire for the aspects of the landscape I want to illustrate.
The moorland above Glossop would provide images of the sources of the water, but also the effects on the peat of the industrialisation. Completing a cycle, it would also enable showing Man’s influence and attempts to restore this with new planting and attempts to stop peat erosion. Lower down in Doctor’s gate a bridge is a memorial to a rambler and illustrates the use of the land for recreation.
Associated with that is also the agricultural influences such as altered river course for sheep washes.
Further down the valley are more obvious agricultural influences on the landscape, and as the river approaches Old Glossop, a pre-industrial village, it flows close to workers cottages. However this scene also incorporates modern factories in use today.
Through the town the rivers are highly controlled and have been extensively used for industry, diverted into mill ponds and other structures. This old industrial heritage can still be seen, but as it decays nature regenerates to create new vegetation.
Finally, after only 6km, Glossop Brook leaves Glossop and joins the Etherow to flow onto the Cheshire plain and into agricultural land, before entering the industrial conurbation of Manchester. Here at the confluence of the rivers was an industrial branch line, the Waterside Branch, running across a viaduct and along the side of the river to the Waterside Mills. Few traces of this remain, such is the regenerative power of nature.
I have now a few sites I plan to visit and develop these themes.
Andrew Procter 