Читать книгу The Ribble Way. A Northern England Trail онлайн

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By then the river has assumed a completely different character, winding lazily through alternating pasture and ancient woodland, where old manor houses and early-18th-century cottages offer a welcome contrast to the all-too-pervasive tide of modernity. At Preston the river encounters the only sizeable conurbation along its course, but even here it remains largely isolated from the commerce and industry of the city. It flows instead below the elegant Victorian parks that were laid out for the recreation of the thousands of workers brought in to operate some of the first factory mills built in the country, replacing what had previously been a cottage industry.

Beyond Preston the river changes dramatically yet again, now running straight to the Irish Sea through an almost featureless plain that was once regularly inundated by the tide. Dykes and drainage ditches have turned what was once a virtually dead-flat waste into productive arable fields, although further to the west a vast expanse of the salt marsh still remains, attracting huge populations of birds, particularly in winter, which find a rich and plentiful source of food in the shallows and mud.