Stand in this wood by the River Goyt, listening to the basso profundo of ravens overhead, and you could imagine that this place is some long-tempered blend of town and country.
In one sense it is. High overhead to the east is the busy Albion Road bridge leading into New Mills town centre. Turn north, and in front of you trees stretch all the way up the hillside, where there are redwings gorging on holly berries and the first pre-spring sounds of wren song that even the rush of the river cannot drown.
Had you been here 40 years ago, however, it would have been hard to tell which would have been more impactful: the sight of the sewage works or the smell from the municipal dump. And don’t leave out the gasworks, whose production of town gas from coal tar had further saturated the spot in heavy toxins.
Recall those earlier words about the rush of the river? That flow had long been used as the town flush toilet, carrying off all manner of pollutants, leaving the Goyt system almost devoid of life. If ever there was a place degraded beyond hope, Mousley Bottom was probably it.
Yet the world hadn’t reckoned with the vision of the late Sir Martin Doughty, who’d been on New Mills council since the age of 26. Add in 22,000 trees, 500 of them oaks planted by the town’s schoolchildren. Bring in the habitat creation works of a council ranger team (whose resources, incidentally, have been slashed from about 250 days a year to four), which turned those straight-lined saplings into complex woodland. Over three decades, these combined forces converted a literal shit-heap into a beautiful town park, a glorious riverside walk and tourist attraction.
Standing here now, you realise that no brownfield site is beyond redemption. The real hero, however, is not our species, but the patient whole-system collaborative efforts of organisms we cannot even see. The archaebacteria, actinomycetes, nematodes, annelids, rotifers etc, the largely subterranean network underpinning the parts of nature that we can observe: the plants, insects, fungi, birds and mammals, all of whom today call Mousley Bottom home.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
