February 8th 2025
On Saturday 8 Feb, the three of us – Aurora, Anke and Ingrid – joined David Bailey of UoM and others for a moss walk at the invitation of the wonderful Friends of Medlock Valley Project , which focuses on the nature, community and heritage of this ‘hidden gem in the heart of Manchester’. https://medlockvalley.org/
We walked through Pin Mill Brow woods, with local community members and activists, including another of the project leaders, builder, artist and long-term resident in the area, Dave O’Rourke, looking, talking and thinking about mosses, about their substrates, ecological powers, stories and histories.
We looked at mosses on apple and birch and willow trees, on the grassy ground, in the margins of the concrete pavement , creeping up through the fingers of Dave’s sculpture of a sleeping woman, and growing incidentally through a buttonhole on a discarded coat. In the walking group of about 20 people, some identified mosses scientifically with the help of written guides, others shared common names for mosses and thought about the conditions of their growth on old brick or old bark, and others still touched and stroked the mossy softness, or paid close attention to mossy forms and shapes with the help of mini-microscopes and hand lenses.
We discussed working-class nineteenth-century moss hunters who knew where and how to find mosses in the city and outside of it; we talked about the extinction of some mosses and the persistence and resilience of many more. We heard stories of the wood’s history, from the old nineteenth-century pathways that ran between houses there, to the heaps of rubble that were all there was on the site after the demolitions of the 1960s until trees were planted in the 1980s. David and Dave told stories about their project too, showed us the living willows they had sculpted with others from the community and talked about their work to develop this wood as a place of enjoyment, beauty and play for all. Dave showed us the way he had constructed Manc Henge, a group of stones set up to catch the sun at different times of day.
It was a joy to join David, Dave and others – a lovely eclectic group of people – to pay attention to mosses and learn from each other.
MossWorlds 