Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/134

96 patch of heather had vanished, and almost the last covey of grouse rose from a field of cabbages. Commerce extends its rapacious arms, populations grow, massing in already congested areas, and nature, unhappy nature, suffers. Eight years before this date Manchester had purchased the moor, cleared the ling and heather, dug up the peat and moss litter, and changed everything. Fussy little locomotives dragged trains of trucks laden with moss litter over the quaking ground, and brought in return loads of refuse from the city; nature's rubbish, converted by natural change into useful fuel, was replaced by the discarded refuse of a teeming population, in its turn to suffer chemical change and become fertilising matter. Gangs of toilers cut and stacked the peats, others tipped in the apparently defiling filth; it was not a pleasant sight. Smoke, grime, and worse had replaced the bright bloom of heather and the sweet smell of fresh cut turf. Already crops were appearing on the marked-out fields, but the Moss was a moss no longer; it was an utterly lost-looking tip, a rubbish heap. Curlew, snipe, twite, viper, emperor, andromeda, and sundew had vanished; docks, nettles, ragwort, and weeds were springing everywhere. The larks and pipits remained, but the sparrow had appeared and the corn bunting found a spot worth colonising.

From north to south and east to west railway lines ran straight across fields whose borders were drainage ditches white with crowfoot; sleepers, well bedded, had replaced the rough planks which had served well enough when the foundations were so uncertain that a truck or locomotive might any time sink into the boggy soil.

Alongside the metals were broad and level roads, leading to the few farms that had already been built.