Woodsmoke and Wild Garlic

This is my diary describing my arrival at the protests against Manchester Airport's Second Runway.

Sunday 23rd March 1997

Pack my tent into my rucksack, put on my combat jacket and head off to Manchester. Yesterday two van loads of riot police arrived whilst myself and half a dozen others were leafleting a BP station in Cosby so I'm in the mood for a bot of radical direct action. The police were actually very nice. The weekend traffic to Southport had backed up towards Liverpool and someone had seen us handing out our leaflets. The message had been passed on to the police as 'Greenpeace are blocking the road'.

Greenpeace's campaign is about stopping oil drilling in the wilderness of the Atlantic Frontier, a campaign set to run over the summer to build up to the Kyoto Conference on climate change at the end of the year. Greenpeace want an end to the supply of new oil in order to prevent global warming, at Manchester Airport we will be opposing the fastest growing users of fossil fuels - aeroplanes.

However Manchester Airport's PR department has been putting out the story that 50,000 jobs will be created by the project, and as I arrive at Piccadilly Station and make my way to the bus station I see why a line like that will sell here. Despite my own ragged appearance, I am approached by beggars as I walk, and some of the city's homeless can be seen sitting in the sun in Piccadilly Gardens, surrounded by the concrete buildings, noise and pollution of the city. By comparison with the life of this urban underclass, the prospect of living in a makeshift camp in the middle of the wilderness is highly desirable. Poverty isn't just a lack of money or housing, it is being cut off from the natural world that should be our common heritage.

I end up on the slow bus to the airport, which winds its way through grey suburbs to the main entrance to the current site, where I leap out. I am in a different world to the concrete and brick jungles I have passed through. This is a land of  verdant hedgerows, stone walls and black and white houses set in lush gardens. Away from the main road I walk along country lanes. Immediately I see the first red and white 'No Runway Two' signs. These people evidently are doing well for themselves and don't need the dubious employment prospects beign offered by the airport.

I meet my first eco-warriors on the lane just before I get  to the site. These are Adrian, a tall young man with a pronounced West Country accent, and a young woman who is very well spoken and truns out to be local. They lead me to the main entrance to the site, a gap in the hedge by the main road. A few years away is the main entrance for the contractor's vehicles. I can see the start of the fence that was started earlier in the week, and which caused the first confrontations with the security guards employed by the construction company.

Adrian leads me up the grass slope towards the woodland that crowns the heights. All the trees are bare of leaves, and the tree houses, 'twigloos', can be seen looking like overgrown birds nests of plastic and wood.From the two occupied trees up ahead a banner reading "No Runway Two' hangs defiantly. This is Flywood. A shallow ditch and barbed wire fence surrounds the camp as a defence against dawn raids. A more effective defence is the clinging mud that surrounds the entire camp. Two planks cross this and lead to a couple of rough benders and a central fire pit. A couple of crusty characters are sitting in a bender drinking cider. Other benders on the edge of the camp appear to service the tree houses and tunnels. One of the tunnellers emerges as I enter, caked in red clay, with his head torch like a third eye.

I am greeted cordially and I explain I'm here to stay and ask where people are needed. I an told that a camp called Wild Garlic has just been set up and needs people. I ask for directions and are given some meaningless stuff about avoiding Cliff Richard, going through Zion Tree and past Bollin Bay, and I'm pointed vaguely in the direction of the current runway.

I slither off over the muddy grass and eventually come across a sign saying "Sir Cliff Richard OBE Vegan Revolution" and what appears to be a well fortified camp. Following the directions I was given I follow the edge of the woods and eventually come to a cheerful sign saying "Welcome to Zion Tree" which is at the top of a slippery, muddy slope through the trees. Struggling under the weight of my rucksack I slowly work my way down the hill and come out into the Bollin valley itself. A broad water meadow completely hidden from the surrounding fields, where the river meanders through the wooded slopes. A small copse by the water's edge contains an empty bender. Multi coloured ribbons are tied to the leafless branches.

To reach Wild Garlic I have to cross the Bollin. It turns out there are two ways of doing this:by a bridge made of planks and scafolding poles, or a rope walkway. Choosing the easier route this time I cross and scramble up the slope towards the camp. Separated from the grass by a channel of water, the camp is a wooded hillside covered by, of course, wild garlic. The trees appear to be a mixtures od ash and birch, and several tree houses are in in the process of being constructed.

The camp itself is reached by a rickety wooden bridge over the stagnant and filthy water. On the other side is a large, communal bender and two smaller ones, for cooking and tool storage. Various eco-warrior types can be seen moving around and doing things ....

Alas it ends there. After that I was too busy tunnelling to write ...

Wild Garlic

Beauty comes in at the eye, but memories enter via the nose. Like the smell of school semolina and new born babies, the scent of wild garlic is one which has stuck in my brain and is forever associated with one time and one place.

The place is here, the damp valley of the River Bollin as it winds its way through the Cheshire countryside, just after its confluence with the River Dean and close to the village of Mobberley. The time is 1997, when Oasis ruled the charts, New Labour is on the brink of power and Swampy is famous.

There should be the smell of wood smoke too, but as I walk the muddy path for the first time in ten years my imagination adds that. It adds other things too, things that have no place in such an idyllic English country scene, arc lights, security guards, police in riot gear or on quad bikes.  

It is May now. The ground is wet, the trees have a thin covering of leaves. Here and there the hawthorn is in blossom. The path rises to drier ground and the scent of garlic, fresh in the damp air, diminishes. As it does so a high pitched whine also rises and then turns into a deep roar. The angry sound subsides to a sigh and a gleaming white jet airliner rises above the trees in front of me.

This is why I was here ten years ago, to stop this bit of Cheshire countryside disappearing under concrete in order to become Manchester Airport’s second runway. We failed, but not though want of trying.

This place changed me, all those years ago. The person who left this spot was not the one who arrived.

Partly this was my age. Twenty seven, what astrologers call the Saturn Return, when the great ringed planet completes its orbit around the sun and returns to the position in the sky it held when you were a baby, a time which has traditionally marked the end of youth.

Partly this was the inevitable result of the way my life was moving. Ten years after leaving my parents home I was, like Odysseus, on the eve of finding my true home and, in due course, my Penelope.

But in no small part I credit the magic of this place, and of the spell that was woven here by the noble wizards and warriors who tried to save this little piece of England from the concrete.

I wasn’t aware of the changes that were taking place in me at the time. A friend I wrote to regularly though was. She noted the change in my letters. At first they were full of the politics of the protest, with talk of Climate Change, emissions targets and government policy. By the end though I wrote about nothing outside of the immediate area of our camp. I described the trees, the mud, the sights and the sounds, the mysterious visitors in the night, and the smell of the wild garlic. My fight had moved from the political to the personal.

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Politically this was the tail end of the Road Protest Movement of the 1990s.

That had started in 1993, on legend-haunted Twyford Down in Hampshire, with a motley collection of Travellers and young activists camping out to stop the widening of the M3 motorway round Winchester. The travelling army then moved to London in an attempt to stop the building of the M11, then up north to stop the M65 near Blackburn.

It all came to a head in 1996, when the building of the Newbury Bypass saw ten thousand trees chopped down and over one thousand arrests. By then the cost had become too much for the treasury and the government pulled the plug on the 'greatest road building program since the Romans'. There was a final cameo at Fairmile in Devon, where Swampy became a tabloid sensation after holding out in his tunnel for a week, but then there were no more roads to oppose.

So when Manchester Airport planned to build a second runway on 400 acres of Cheshire Greenbelt, the travelling circus moved up north and set up camp. This was almost my back yard and so, not having much else to do at the time, I came and joined in.

I pitched my tent in the camp known as Wild Garlic. Located at the heart of the development site, where the new runway would cross the River Bollin, we were as far as possible from civilization and completely out of sight. The camp itself was a cluster of ash, beech and birch trees on a slope, with farmland at the top and flood meadow at the bottom. 

We were definitely rather more chilled out than the big camps. Whilst the others put up fortifications to keep people out, we decorated our ‘front door’ with ribbons to invite people in. Our token defensive gesture was a wooden drawbridge over the muddy ditch that marked the limit of the camp. Come the day the authorities decided to pay us a visit, this was defeated by a policeman with longer than average legs. 

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Ten years ago there were a lot of police in the quiet woods. 

Walking the footpath I am now on by day you would have passed them parked up in their vans, usually bored. Beyond them the Land Rovers of security guards patrolled around a fence topped with barbed wire. More security guards huddled in groups, their rank indicated by the colour of their helmets.

Within the fence were the five camps where the protesters lived. Everyone was waiting for the day when the courts would allow the authorities to begin removing them. Around the camps vehicles had churned the grass into mud so that passengers taking off from the airport looked down on five islands of green amongst a sea of devastation.

By night the area was even busier. Whilst the security clustered under arc lights, figures would move silently in the shadows. When morning revealed a section of fence missing or a lighting rig toppled, the blame was laid at the door of the ‘pixies’.

These three groups of people - police, security and protesters - interacted with each other and this place in complicated ways. 

The security guards, the unemployed of Manchester offered a few weeks’ work at basic pay, were suspicious of the police they were supposed to be working with. They would tell me that once they were home and had taken off their uniforms they were regarded once more as the enemy by the boys in blue. Such was life in nineties Britain. 

Of the protesters, they were mainly incredulous. Most had grown up in the city on council estates. When I first arrived, a group watched in wonder as I put up my tent and seriously questioned if I intended to sleep in it. Of the people who made their homes in rickety ‘twigloos’ in the branches of trees, they had only admiration.

The police were more reticent in their dealings with us. Always with one eye on more serious matters, they usually dealt with us fairly whilst keeping their distance. An extremely laid back liaison officer was assigned, a veteran of two decades carrying a machine gun around the airport, and friction was mostly avoided. 

For example, when the police started taking an interest in the pits we were digging around the camp and covering with tarpaulins, a confidential intelligence briefing was produced with diagrams of IRA mortar positions recently used to attack Heathrow Airport. Noting the similarity we agree to allow an inspection of our holes. Having thus been reassured that our toilet facilities were not a danger to anyone except the person using them, the authorities were placated.

The protesters, meanwhile, were a very mixed bunch. Many were veterans of the previous campaigns, but for many others though this was their first experience of both protest and life outside of the city. Some, products of the antibiotic age and rebels against the advice of parental authority figures, neglected basic hygiene and soon retired from camp on health grounds. 

Those who survived though soon settled into a routine of work and fun. Most took to the air, constructing homes in the sky and aerial walkways to link them.

Those of us with no head for heights though would burrow into the red earth. The clay soil was perfect for this and so we dug in like soldiers preparing to endure a heavy bombardment. The Manchester clay is apparently similar to the soil of the Somme, to the extent that in the First World War the 'clay kickers' who had dug the Manchester sewers were drafted in to tunnel under the German lines. If they were like other soldiers in the trenches, they would have used garlic as a natural antibiotic.

And whilst we tunnelled the aeroplanes continued to fly. The camps were at the end of the original runway, and planes taking off appeared to graze the top of nearby Zion Tree, deafening whoever happened to be occupying the Pterodactyls' Nest twigloo. On the surface the first hint of a take-off was the high pitched whine which slowly turned into a bass roar. Underground the order was reversed, starting with the tunnel walls shaking and ending with the hiss of the plane passing overhead.

Opponents of airport expansion we may have been, but seeing the operations of a large airport at such close quarters it was hard not to be amazed by the marvelous technological achievement of modern air travel, which has joined the world together like no other invention. At any one time there is the equivalent of the population of Manchester in the air. On 99 days out of 100, every single one of those passengers will arrive safely, which isn't something you can say about many means of transport

.

However it is an achievement only made possible by the chance existence of oil. The kerosene used as aviation fuel has twice the energy density of TNT, and every day Manchester Airport used 3000 tons of the stuff. As it combines with oxygen when it is burnt, a ton of aviation fuel produces three and a half times its own weight in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and the primary component of man-made Climate Change. In addition the vapour trails of high flying jets also heat the air. A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that the contribution to Global Warming from the aeroplanes using the airport is about half of the total emissions from the Greater Manchester area.

Those planes keep me company as I continue along the path. The River Bollin meanders through the trees on our right, a lazy river today with large areas of mud exposed on its flanks, dotted with the debris of previous floods.

But its merry wandering is brought up short when it meets the new runway. Here, at the point that marked the edge of River Rats camp, it has been funnelled into a new course which runs straight as a die under the tarmac. Where my cosy little tunnel was dug there is now a vast, semi-circular cavern ten metres high.

On this side there is no trace of Wild Garlic camp. What I do find though is a newly erected sign board, part of a walking trail marked out around the perimeter of the airport, which tells me that near this spot was found the remains of a Bronze Age village. This is remarkable news. Our primitive camp had been built on top of a settlement from the days of the pagan Britons. I had no idea.

We'd known they were here before us, of course. How could we not? A short walk from the camp, beyond the range of the patrolling security guards, was Lindow Moss, a little community on reclaimed land on the edge of the commuter town of Wilmslow. Lindow Man, known locally as Pete Marsh, had been found there.

Pete, a man who had done no manual work in at least the last year of his short life, had suffered a head injury and apparent strangulation before being dropped into the murky waters of the Moss. This suggests a ritual 'triple death' in Earth, Air and Water, a theory supported by the traces of mistletoe in his stomach, a plant sacred to the Druids of these isles.

Analysis of the radioactive carbon in his bones suggests a date for his death around the first century CE, so this sacrifice could have been made at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. Could Pete have come from this village, the one found under out camp, and given his life in an attempt to stop the invasion of the globalizing empire that invented concrete?  

So was this perhaps another reason this spot had such a profound effect, these ancient echoes contained in the soil? 

At first digging my tunnel had been a chore. I would force myself to work an hour at time underground, holding back the fear of becoming trapped, or of the roof caving in, before coming up for tea and fresh air. Then one day, as the siege lines around the camps drew closer, my view of the world changed suddenly. Safety, I now felt, was underground behind my locked steel door. My fear was of being caught in the open before I could reach the entrance to the tunnel. 

From then on I slept under the earth, dreaming that I was in a homely cavern deep underground. Perhaps I was influenced by Alan Garner, whose novel The Weird Stone of Briningamen opens with the story of a farmer from nearby Mobberley who sells a white mare to a bunch of knights sleeping under Alderley Edge.

Either way, it was because of this that I missed the pixie. Not one of the ones out to do the fences, but

a real one. Maybe.

Eviction day was approaching and things were tense in the camps. In Wild Garlic Ollie left a candle burning in his tree house when he popped out and set fire to the thing. In River Rats there was a climbing accident and Jonathon, a local man, was attacked by persons unknown whilst wandering in the trees at night.

And then Kim saw her Pixie.

Kim was from the Liverpool Earth First! group, a bunch of radical anarcho-greens from the big city, and so was not the sort person to be usually found out in the woods contemplating her navel and talking to the spirits in the trees. So it was therefore a bit of a shock to her when she leaned out of her tree house one night and saw on the ground below her a real live pixie. The fellow was about two feet high and looked a bit like Dobby the House Elf. She looked at the pixie, the pixie looked at her, and then it ran off through the undergrowth.

Two other people though confirmed that something had been in the camp that night. One person saw the creature running off, but it was too quick for him to identify it, whilst another heard but it but didn’t see it. 

 

I never actually found the tracks, but I suspect it was a fox, as we knew they visited our camps. Or maybe pixies pretend to be foxes sometimes to confuse the cynics, or that maybe pixies are just foxes that you catch a glimpse of in the night at special times. Anyone who’s heard a vixen’s mating cry in a lonely forest at night knows there is no ‘just’ about being a fox; they are spirits of the forest in their own right.

Kim’s story wasn’t unique. Many other people found living in the camps brought on mystical experiences. Living in twigloos brought on powerful dreams and some felt able to communicate with the trees they were guarding. Others saw black cats leaping from tree to tree or heard drumming coming from empty camps. In the woods of Newbury an amphibious beast launched itself out the canal whilst security guards claimed to have seen the ghosts of Civil War soldiers whose graves had been disturbed.

It was in those Newbury woods that Jim Hindle was led by dreams to defend the solitary Middle Oak, whilst at the same time he was haunted by a seeming premonition of its destruction. Druids blessed his tree, but still the dreams continued. Then, one morning, he woke to the sound of chainsaws. Another oak, almost Middle Oaks's twin, sited next to the main road and connected to it by a single strand of rope, like an umbilical cord, had been felled. Middle Oak survived and still stands today.

So if I was changed by my time at Wild Garlic, it was an experience I shared with many others.

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"Sorry"
"F*ck off"

This was the sum total of my conversation with one of Britain's elite soldiers, who I had just caught sneaking over the bridge from Zion Tree to Wild Garlic. Eviction day had found me on guard duty rather than in my tunnel. 

Following on the from the scary men-in-black were much politer police in their riot vans, then swarms of yellow coated security guards in Land Rovers, cheerful Welsh bailiffs on quad bikes then specialist climbers and underground rescue people. Watching them was the assembled mass press corps with their satellite link up vehicles. 

I joined them on the grass next to the Wilmslow Road and found everyone was being served tea by the mobile soup kitchen of the Salvation Army. We were being evicted, but in a very curious way.

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It is now 17 April 2010 and I have returned to the Bollin Valley again, but I find a very different scene to my last visit. 

Venus as the Evening Star sinks slowly into the West, following a blood red sun. The new moon hangs in the sky over the red eyes of the airport's radar dish. Wild garlic still infuses the night air. But the skies are empty, the wood is silent. There are no planes.

An Icelandic Volcano has grounded planes across Europe, and Manchester Airport is shut.

Thirteen years before, we produced a tape of songs recorded in the camps. It is a unique musical record, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that most of the songs are interrupted by a plane taking off. One contribution was called "Silence". Then it was ironic, now it seems prophetic.

In due course the ash clouds will pass and the planes return. Newly washed chives flown in from Ethiopia will reappear on the supermarket shelves, and travellers will return from far flung destinations.

But for tonight at least, I am alone with the spirits of this place and able to dream that another world is possible.

Protest Walks #1: Wild Garlic at Manchester Airport

Being a circular walk through the Cheshire countryside taking us from the Iron Age to the Jet Age via the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Approximately 8 miles, taking about three and a half hours, mostly on good paths (but with one muddy bit though) and involving very little climbing.

OS Explorer Map 268 Wilmslow, Macclesfield & Congleton

Starting point: Car Park on Lindow Common

1. Lindow Common

Lindow Common

The walk starts on Lindow Common, a Sight of Special Scientific Interest to the west of the prosperous commuter belt town of Wilmslow. The area may be Footballers Wives, but here on the common you can see why the Ancient Britons regarded this area as a liminal place, neither earth nor sea.

At the centre is the Black Lake, which in Welsh in llyn ddu, from which we get Lindow. Visit at twilight and you get an idea of how the Ancient Brits could regard the shadowy reflections in its waters as glimpses into the Otherworld.

When you are done exploring, leave the Common by the southwest exit, cross Racecourse Road and walk down Lindow Lane, marked as a dead end. Carry on until you reach a T junction at Racecourse Farm and turn left. Carry straight on at a crossroads of footpaths and byways until you come to another T junction where you join Rotherwood Road.

2. Lindow Man

Reconstruction of Lindow Man

You are now on the edge of the field in which the head of Lindow Woman was found. The police used the discovery to prompt a Mr Reyn-Bardt to confess to the murder of his wife in 1960, but it turned out the body was much more interesting, being nearly 2000 years old.

The next year the even better preserved body of Lindow Man, known locally as Pete Marsh, was found. A young man who had done no hard labour prior to his death by strangulation, a blow to the head and possibly drowning, he also had traces of mistletoe in his stomach. Mistletoe being sacred to the Druids, his 'triple death' in this liminal place suggested human sacrifice. Radio carbon dating places his death in approximately the first century AD, right about the time that the Romans were conquering this part of the known world. Could Lindow Man have been an offering to the Gods, asking them to turn back the seemingly unstoppable legions with their suspiciously straight roads? Protest AD60 style.

Peat cutting in 2015

Incidentally, ignore the grid reference for the location of the find given on Wikipedia, in the guide book and the various press releases. That puts Pete right in the middle of a definitely not Iron Age former corporation rubbish dump about a kilometre north of here. That was deliberately misinformation to put off looters. The actual spot is just off Moor Lane, near the houses you can see on the far side of the field.

Peat cutting has now finished here, so nobody knows if there are more bodies waiting to be discovered, including the unfortunately Mrs Reyn-Bardt?

3. Morley Green

Mist on Lindow Moss

There isn't much to see in the field today, unless you are lucky enough to experience one of the ethereal mists that come down on the moss and seemingly take you back 2000 years.

Peat cutting and draining of the area has changed the ecology completely, but the community here on the Moss does still feel removed from the outside world.

Turn right on Rotherwood Road and keep walking until you see a sign for a Private Nature Reserve. By now aircraft noise is probably starting to become a feature of the walk.



Carry straight on, following the purple signs for Lauren's Ride and Bridal Path to Morley. the road becomes a path and then a road again, bearing right until it arrives in the middle of Morley Green.

Morley Green

Cross the road, leaving the village sign on the green to the right and the Cheshire Smokehouse on the left. Continue down the road for about 500m, ignoring the footpath on the right, but taking the one on the left a few yards further on marked Castle Mill.

This leads to a path that soon becomes rather muddy that take you towards Manchester Airport. You will see a red and white radar dish in front of you.

If you wish a walk unspoilt by the twentieth century you can take the footpath through the metal kissing gate on the right and rejoin the walk at the Holiday Inn. However as the whole point of this walk is to visit the sight of events in 1997 I suggest you carry straight on, following the path which keeps left when you get to a triangular field.

4. Wild Garlic

Wild Garlic in the Bollin Valley

The path descends towards a wooden bridge and here should find yourself assaulted by the scent of wild garlic. When asked to describe the smells of the protests of the 1990s may aromas come to mind, but the most pleasant ones were wood smoke and wild garlic.

Here in the Bollin Valley we were immersed in the garlic from dawn to dusk. Sometimes, when we were hard up, it was added 'frasiers' - cakes made from self raising flour and water - which made something resembling food, but only just. I would like to say that after months of living in the camps I was infused with garlic too, but most people would say I smelt of much worse.

Not far past this bridge, you come to another junction. Take the footpath to the right marked Bollin Valley Way.



Eviction day, May 1997

If this was 1997 you would now be headed towards a security fence, lit at night by arc lights, and patrolled by Police, Bailiffs and up to 500 security guards. All this was to remove less than a hundred protesters from the sight of Manchester Airports second runway. The camps were first surrounded by wire and guards, and then the protesters were slowly removed from their treetop houses and tunnels.

Bored security, 1997

I was evicted on the first day, but I returned three days later, at night, along the path you have just walked with Ollie Big Dog and Kim. Our aim was to get back to our camp, appropriately enough called Wild Garlic, which was being evicted. We slipped between the security guards, climbed the fence at a spot where the barbed wire was missing, and evaded the bailiffs who were patrolling on quad bikes with night vision devices. I created a diversion whilst Ollie and Kim made a run for it. They didn't make it.

A few days later I returned with a BBC documentary maker. She too wanted to get inside the security perimeter. She'd asked for a cameraman, and had hoped for some young hotshot with a camcorder. instead she got a grizzled old veteran with a camera the size of a suitcase, who regaled us with stories of wars he's covered around the globe whilst we blundered around in the dark. The film never got made.

5. CAR2

Zion Tree

As you walk towards the sound of jet engines you will see the incongruous sight of fully laden jumbo jets rising slowly over the Cheshire Countryside. During the days of the campaign Against Runway 2 the aircraft appeared to grave the top of the great beech of Zion Tree camp.

The camps were located either side of the large tunnel you can now see in front of you, which was build to accommodate the River Bollin.

In 1997 protesters, and journalists looking for a scoop, soon discovered the limitations of security guards paid less than what is now the minimum wage. On dry land they'd hand you over to the police, but faced by a river a few inches deep they decided to keep their feet dry and you could walk into the site unmolested along the river.

When you join the path that runs round the perimeter of the runway, next to a wooden bridge, you will find a sign board that tells you that archaeologists discovered during the building of the runway that our medieval camps were built on the sight of a iron age farmstead. It would be too much to imagine that Lindow Man came from here, but it's not impossible.

Manchester Airport Tunnel, 1997

To visit the site of the camps themselves, take a little diversion into the tunnel.

On the right, as you enter, would have been River Rats, which you reached form here via a dodgy rope walk over the river. Beyond that would have been the Camp Cliff Richard (funny how we never got the press to run that line, especially once it had been penetrated by the Sheriffs men) where Swampy and the serious protesters lived. Beyond that and nearer the road was Flywood, home of the leery, beery trolls who snaffled the prized donations of food and booze.

Manchester Airport Tunnel, 2013

Towards the end of the tunnel and also on the right would have been Zion Tree, and on the left my own camp called, appropriately enough, Wild Garlic. No occupied trees survive, but if you carry on out of the tunnel and into the bushes on the far side you come to a steep bank on the left with a muddy ditch in front of it. technically this was probably part of Wild Garlic camp, and the ditch became our moat, complete with drawbridge. On the day it was defeated by a copper with longer than average legs, but it looked the part.



Wild Garlic camp, 1997

Although the poor old yellow hatted security guards were paid peanuts, the expert climbers and rescuers used to get the protesters out of the tree houses and tunnels were collecting a hundred pounds an hour or so for their work. We tried to make their job as hard as possible.

One of the more colourful characters in Wild Garlic was Carl, who came from a rather interesting family in New Brighton. Carl was the proud owner of more piercing than anyone else, and he tried to use these to aid the defences of the camp.



Carl meets the press with nail

When the climbers reached his tree house they found him lying with his head against the wooden pallet that made up the floor, attempting to hammer a six inch nail though the hole where his large ear stud had been using the blunt end of a hand axe. It didn't work, the nail wouldn't go into the wood, but when he gave up the climbers told him to lie back down again as they could get an hours extra work out of this. They ordered up some special tools, and then spent the next hour chatting and smoking with Carl.



My own contribution to the defence of the camp was rather more limited. Eviction day found me on day patrol. Down by the bridge across to Zion Tree i met some men in black balaclavas across the water. "Hello," I said, assuming they were with us. "F*** Off," came the reply, as they weren't. They were either a special police unit, or more likely the SAS anti-terrorist unit, called in after bogus claims we'd booby trapped the woods. They demolished the bridge, leaving the River Bollin between me and them, which I thought was a good idea. We'd though Wild Garlic would be hit first and I'd volunteered to help local activist Jeff Gazzard with the PR, so my camping days ended rather mildly as I walked off the site voluntarily.

6. The Airport

Manchester Airport

Return to the bridge and turn left out of the tunnel, heading north. As you climb up towards the fire station you will see the whole of Manchester Airport to your left. A marvellous technological achievement, modern air travel has joined the world together like no other achievement. At any one time there is the equivalent of the population of Manchester in the air. On 99 days out of 100 every single one of those passengers will arrive safely, which isn't something you can say about many means of transport.

However it is an achievement only made possible by the chance existence of oil. The kerosene used as aviation fuel has twice the energy density of TNT, and every day Manchester Airport uses 3000 tons of the stuff. As it combines with oxygen when it is burnt, a ton of aviation fuel produces three and a half times its own weight in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and the primary component on man-made Climate Change. In addition the vapour trails of high flying jets also heats the air. A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests that the airports contribution to Global Warming is of the same order of magnitude as the rest of the city of Manchester.

7. Styal Country Park

Yet more wild garlic...

Continue along the Runway 2 Trail. After the Fire Station the path is badly marked and continues across the grass, not down the access road. Eventually you descend down some steps to the A538, by a roundabout and near the Holiday Inn. in 1997 this was the Moat House. It didn't usually serve protesters, but if you hung around long enough you'd usually find a journalist willing to buy you a drink for a story.

Cross the main road and continue down the unused road off the roundabout to the north. It can be used as an unofficial car park, as it was in 1997, if you want to start the walk here. Had you been here on the morning of May you'd have found a bedraggled group of survivors from Zion Tree, including a journalist with a bleeding ear, and a battery of press trucks which included everything from ITN to L!VE TV - although neither the News Bunny nor any Topless Darts players were seen.

Styal Cross



At the end of the short road a sign shows you are entering National Trust land. Go through the gate and follow the path, keeping right when it branches after about 100m. You are now following the River Bollin as it meanders through a low gorge.

On the left in Arthur's Wood, the scene of another protest in 1999 when more trees were cut down during the construction of the second runway.

Cross the river at Giant's Castle Bridge then again at Oxbow bridge. The paths multiply as you enter Styal Country Park and if your not careful you can find yourself going round in circles. I kept left after Oxbow Bridge, crossed a dry valley on Chapel Bridge, and then at a small metal bridge turn left.

This takes you along the holly hedge that borders Norcliffe Chapel and then on to Styal Cross, a Victorian erection on a medieval base that has had a number of adventurers before returning to its original site a few years ago. Go through the gate marker Quarry Bank Mill.

8. Quarry Bank Mill



Quarry Bank Mill

So how did we get from venerating nature as the home of the gods (and sacrificing the odd posh person to her) to seeing it as both the source of a free lunch and a dustbin that never needs emptying?

Part of the answer is here at the mill, for we are now at the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

Built by Samuel Greg 1784, just 13 years after Richard Arkwright showed the way at Cromford, and before the steam engine was a viable concept, this water powered mill showed the future.

The scale of the mill was, for its day, astounding. But the mill didn't just represent technological step change, but a social one as well. For the first time, the working day was set by something other than the natural cycle of the earth, as people served the machines and not the other way round.

Styal Village

Whole families worked here, including children from the workhouse who weren't paid. the Greg family also owned slaves in the West Indies, but forced labour for white children continued here for years after it was outlawed for black adults.

So why did people give up their pastoral existence to become wage slaves in a Dark Satanic Mill. You've actually just walked past the answer; the picturesque Styal Village. The mill offered regular work, regular wages and a place to live, something worth the loss of the occasional finger.

Things got better of course, and it was the much maligned Victorians who sorted the factories out. But Dark Satanic Mills still exist, just not in this country, and the products of their sweated labour arrive in this country in part via Manchester Airport.

9. Wilmslow

Explore the mill if you want to, then take the path in front of the Mill Pantry marked "Picnic Area". Continue on a path that again takes you along the River Bollin. There's a diversion to the weir and further on it diverges again, but whichever route you take you eventual end up at the B5166. Turn right and cross the river on the foot bridge next to the road bridge and continue to the car park you see in front of you.

Cross the river again at the bridge and continue straight, ignoring a path to the left. Continue on past the rugby ground on Kings Road. You are now in Wilmslow, home to stars of the Premier League and Coronation Street, and a thriving Aston Martin dealership. At the end of Kings Road is the A538, along which I used to trudge in 1997 on the way to the off license. Well, there wasn't much else to do in the evening at the camps.

At the end of Kings Road turn left to the Premier Inn, on the other side of which is Lindow Moss where we started.

The route:

Leave Lindow Common by the southwest exit, cross Racecourse Road and walk down Lindow Lane, marked as a dead end. Carry on until you reach a T junction at Racecourse farm and turn left. Carry straight on at a crossroads of footpaths and byways until you come to another T junction where you join Rotherwood Road.

Turn right on Rotherwood Road and keep walking until you see a sign for a Private Nature Reserve. Carry straight on, following the purple signs for Lauren's Ride and Bridal Path to Morley. the road becomes a path and then a road again, bearing right until it arrives in the middle of Morley Green.

Cross the road, leaving the village sign on the green to the right and the Cheshire Smokehouse on the left. Continue down the road for about 500m, ignoring the footpath on the right, but taking the one on the left a few yards further on marked Castle Mill.

This leads to a path that soon becomes rather muddy that take you towards Manchester Airport. You will see a red and white radar dish in front of you. Carry straight on, following the path which keeps left when you get to a triangular field.

The path descends towards a wooden bridge. Not far past this bridge, you come to another junction. Take the footpath to the right marked Bollin Valley Way. By the tunnel under runway, join the Runway 2 Trail and turn right over the bridge.

Continue along the Runway 2 Trail. After the Fire Station the path is badly marked and continues across the grass, not down the access road. Eventually you descend down some steps to the A538, by a roundabout and near the Holiday Inn.

Cross the main road and continue down the unused road off the roundabout to the north. At the end of the short road go through the gate marked National Trust and follow the path, keeping right when it branches after about 100m, following the river. Cross the river at Giant's Castle Bridge then again at Oxbow bridge and keep left. Cross a dry valley on Chapel Bridge, and then at a small metal bridge turn left.

Follow the holly hedge that borders Norcliffe Chapel and then on to Styal Cross. Go through the gate marker Quarry Bank Mill.

Take the path in front of the Mill Pantry marked "Picnic Area". Continue on a path that again takes you along the River Bollin. There's a diversion to the weir and further on it diverges again, but whichever route you take you eventual end up at the B5166. Turn right and cross the river on the foot bridge next to the road bridge and continue to the car park you see in front of you.
 

Cross the river again at the bridge and continue straight, ignoring a path to the left. Continue on past the rugby ground on Kings Road.

At the end of Kings Road turn left to the Premier Inn, on the other side of which is Lindow Moss where we started.