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It is scattered over a broad surface upon a gently undulating plain, and its suburbs straggle out into the country villages, which it is steadily absorbing in its rapid growth; the Irwell passes in a winding course through the city, receiving a couple of tributaries; this river divides Manchester from Salford, but a dozen bridges unite them.
If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find on a peninsula formed by the river, a town of eighty thousand inhabitants, which, properly speaking, is one large working-men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue. Salford, once more important than Manchester, was then the leading town of the surrounding district to which it still gives its name, Salford Hundred.
It was a sultry, heavy day, and I walked without much enjoyment of the air and exercise. We crossed a narrow and swift river, flowing between deep banks. It must have been either the Mersey, still an infant stream, and little dreaming of the thousand mighty ships that float on its farther tide, or else the Irwell, which empties into the Mersey.
They were attracted by the print works and cotton mills which lay by the Irwell, as it crept along in its bright and rural valley towards Manchester. When passing the works of Sir Robert Peel at Nuttal, near Bury, they admired the beauty of the situation. The thought possessed them that they would like to obtain some employment in the neighbourhood. They went together in search of a situation.
From the crown of the hill near Walmesley they surveyed the wide extent of country which lay before them, the river Irwell making its circuitous course through the valley. They were utter strangers in the neighbourhood, and knew not which way to turn. To decide their course they put up a stick, and agreed to pursue the direction in which it fell.
The stick fell in the direction of Ramsbottom, then a little village in the bottom of the valley, on the river Irwell. There they went, and found employment. They were thrifty, economical, and hard-working; and they soon saved money. Their savings became capital, and they invested it in a little print work. Their capital grew, and they went on investing it in print works and cotton mills.
He now began to aim at taking a higher position, and entertained the ambition of beginning business on his own account. One of his first efforts in this direction was the preparation of the design of a cast-iron bridge over the Irwell, at Blackfriars, for which a prize was offered.
The bridges of masonry upon the line were of many kinds; several of them askew bridges, and others, such as those at Newton and over the Irwell at Manchester, straight and of considerable dimensions; but the principal piece of masonry was the Sankey viaduct. This fine work is principally of brick, with stone facings. It consists of nine arches of fifty feet span each.
Nevermore was the bridge across the Irwell a bridge of sighs for me. And the meanest of the factory population thanks be to their discrimination despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a thought or a menace upon a cipher so abject. This change, therefore, being so sudden and so total, ought to signalize itself externally by a commensurate break in the narrative.
One often-told anecdote well illustrates the characters of the nobleman and his engineer, if we remember that no such works had ever been erected in England at that time. "When Brindley proposed to carry the canal over the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, by an aqueduct 39 feet above the surface of the water, he desired, for the satisfaction of his employer, to have another engineer consulted.
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