Gorton

In Notes and Queries 1870, p156 is the following extract from John Higson’s Gorton Historical Recorder: ‘Well do I remember in childhood’s days an isolated Gorton farmstead, with a yeoman’s house dating back to the early part of the seventeenth century. Almost overshadowing it was a sombre old yew-tree, doubtless coeval, but then beginning to decay. This end was being hastened by the annual yuletide custom of lopping off the branches, in order to decorate the tiny leaden-casemented windows then existing in the house, and also in a chapel hard by the green in a neighbouring village. Lying at some depth beneath the grassy hillock, on which the fine old tree had long stood sentinel, was a deep dismal pool which had some time been excavated as a marl pit’.