Kersal Moor
| Kersal Moor | |
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Kersal Moor, August 2007
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| Highest point | |
| Elevation | 30 ft (9.1 m) to 75 feet (23 m) |
| Coordinates | 53°30′55″N 2°16′35″W / 53.51528°N 2.27639°WCoordinates: 53°30′55″N 2°16′35″W / 53.51528°N 2.27639°W |
| Geography | |
 Kersal Moor
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| Location | Kersal, Greater Manchester, England |
| OS grid | SD816021 |
Kersal Moor is a recreation area in Kersal, Greater Manchester, England which consists of eight hectares of moorland bounded by Moor Lane, Heathlands Road, St. Paul's Churchyard and Singleton Brook.
Kersal Moor, first called Karsey or Carsall Moor, originally covered a much larger area, running down to the River Irwell. Evidence of activity during the Neolithic period has been discovered and the area was used by the Romans. It was the site of the first Manchester Racecourse and the second golf course to be built outside Scotland. It has been extensively used for other sporting pursuits, military manoeuvres and public gatherings such as the Great Chartist Meeting of 1838, prompting the political theorist Friedrich Engels to dub it "the Mons Sacer of Manchester".
With the increasing industrialisation and urbanisation of Manchester and Salford during the 18th and 19th centuries, the moor became one of the remaining areas of natural landscape of interest to amateur naturalists, one of whom collected the only known specimens of the now extinct moth species Euclemensia woodiella. It is now a Site of Biological Importance and in 2007 was designated as a Local Nature Reserve by English Nature.
Kersal Moor is one of the many fluvioglacial ridges that formed along the Irwell Valley during the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Typically for this type of landform, the subsoil is composed of sand mixed with coarse gravel. The 19th century botanist Richard Buxton described this as "Mr. E.W. Binney's drift deposit no.2 ... a deposit of sharp forest sand, parted with layers of gravel composed of Azoic, Palaeozoic and Triassic rocks, well rounded, parted with layers of fine sand, and having every appearance of a regular deposit by water." This deposit is overlaid with a thin topsoil supporting a range of mosses, heathers, grasses, ferns,common broom, gorse and some trees, which are predominantly oak with some rowan, cherry and other broadleaved species. The land to the south is elevated, rising to a high point towards the south-west. From this elevated position there are views across Manchester to the Derbyshire hills in the south, to the Pennines in the north east and across the Irwell Valley and Salford in the west. The land falls away to the north, ending with two drumlin-shaped hills on the northern edge, which were probably formed by sediment from the meltwater of the receding glaciers, in a process known as sedimentary fluting. The moor is criss-crossed with footpaths, many of which cut through to the sand and gravel below. Singleton Brook, to the north of the moor, denotes the boundary between Salford and Prestwich.
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