Mention the Corn Brook amongst drainers and most people will say something along the lines of 'Siologen said it was the most hardcore drain in town' or something like that. We took two trips of around five hours each to traverse the 5.6km of underground river, from the Bridgewater Canal to Gorton, a winding course taking in Hulme, Moss Side and the city centre.
So much has changed on the surface in Manchester, but underneath it's much the same as Siologen first reported back in 2004. Crawling, stooping, clambering, stopping, starting you name it this drain has the lot. Knee-deep sections of sticky, stinking mud to shallow trickles of water.
On the first trip myself, SparkUK and Bigjobs headed upstream from the near the outfall, barely taking the time to grab any pictures (between us we took around half a dozen), intent on putting in the miles, but we made slow progress, and in five and a half hours we only made it as far as the university, a short cab ride took us back to the cars, exhausted.
A month later we met up again and popped the same manhole we'd emerged from four weeks before. This time we were better prepared and had a better idea of what lay ahead of us as we struck a course westwards. Deteremined to find the infall of this underground Everest.Concrete dominates the downstream section of the Corn Brook as it winds its way towards the city centre, upstream though is an entirely different ballgame, red brick tunnels of all shapes and sizes, some of them are huge, some of them are stoopy, wet, crusty and crawling height. All of it is great fun though!
So, it was another five hour trip underground, this time with pictures and I think we all agreed, the second half is SO much better than the first.Hardcore as fook though.
Mendo :->
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1 comment:
Some cracking pictures there as usual fella. Sounds like an interesting night/day as well!
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