Warrington

It’s not so much a mist as a murk, a weakness of light due to the late season and lowering sky. Mirroring the grasping hands of wintry trees are bare branches plunged into still water, in turn reflected there. I think of flooded forests on the upper Amazon. I’m in Warrington. If the juxtaposition seems silly or funny, that’s not my problem.

I’ve come to take a circular walk along the Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, two great watercourses almost universally ignored – certainly by travel writers and tourist boards and, from the evidence of the empty footpaths, by Warringtonians too. It’s a Saturday afternoon. No doubt the locals are largely seated beside their hearths, perhaps reading the glossy supplements, surfing the net, wondering over a holiday away from the pandemic pandemonium and the pall of December.

Most of the travel we choose is chosen for us – at best by past adventurers, more usually by tour firms devoted to cliche and consumption. I’d bet Warrington is less attractive to most British passport holders than Ulaanbaatar, Bilbao or Cancún – despite those places being, respectively, poorer, more industrialised, more dangerous. Capitalism, the Crap Towns crowd and all those unfunny-as-hell websites have made much of the UK unfashionable, undesirable and uncool.

Yet a minimal effort uncovers Warrington’s secrets: the statue of Cromwell, whose forces overcame the Duke of Hamilton’s Royalists and Scots in 1648; the Academy, where Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, worked and which once made the town the “Athens of the North”; the Bank Quay factories that turned us into a nation of sweet-scented soap users; one of the UK’s last transporter bridges; and Warrington Bridge itself, on the old Roman road, once a portal to a swampy nowhere, then to Northumbria, Lancashire and, post-1974, a dubious corner of Cheshire.

As for the walk, well, you get to see the glorious Mersey, which meanders wildly here at its shallowest stretch; the Woolston Cut (now an ecology trail) was built to shave off a great loop. You see the ship canal, the precursor to those of Panama and Suez (where you’d no doubt love to take a holiday). I see a cormorant skimming, a stork rising like an old C-54 Skymaster from nearby Burtonwood, and a huge raft of tufted ducks by the weir, dabbling and drifting. I hear the hum of the M6; transport is everywhere in the north-west. Above all, I feel, in the gloom-hued canal, the rushing river, and in the great iron girders and steel spans of rail and road bridges, the weight and tow and flow of history.

At the Barley Mow pub, built in 1561 and a rare Tudor trinket in a town obsessed with rebranding, regeneration and, above all, demolition, I toast Warrington’s wonderful absence from Unesco’s or any other sappy heritage list. Overtourism? It’s not a problem. It’s just you, on your holidays, with everyone else.