The road from Wigan: a walk along Greater Manchester’s new 200-mile green trail

Two swans and six dusty-grey cygnets mew and whistle as they glide in single file along the canal. Silver birches wiggle their leaves in the gentlest of autumn breezes. Auburn, ochre, russet and shades in between glow in the afternoon sun. It’s time for a sit down and a cuppa.

I’m not in a national park or an arboretum. I’m walking between Wigan and Leigh on the GM Ringway – the 200-mile (320km) loop around Manchester that’s just been given the final signoff now waymarking is in place. And, once we got out of Wigan town centre, the little green badges stamped with an arrow and a QR code were very much in evidence.

The Ringway is designed to be walked anticlockwise. The rationale behind this is that it officially starts in the city centre with three sections labelled as “leisurely” and then proceeds east before heading north and getting harder where moorland makes walks “moderate” and “challenging”. No plans are in place to sign the route for clockwise walkers.

The route is divided into 20 sections ranging from seven to 13 miles in length. A time-poor completist could walk it all in a fortnight but most people who tackle the whole thing will probably do so over day trips.

I chose Stage 16: Wigan to Leigh (moderate, 10.1 miles) because I live north of the GM Ringway and didn’t want to drive too far. Also, I grew up near St Helens and, despite the rugby and pie rivalries, I like Wigan. I also fancied a canal walk on a warm, sunny autumn day. Flatness is seductive. As are big open skies. You don’t have to watch your feet quite so much on towpaths or crossing fields.

The start was at Wallgate, one of the town’s two railway stations. Then came Trencherfield Mill, Eckersley Mills (home to the Feast at the Mills weekend food hall) and a cluster of canalside warehouses that have, in recent years, been home to the Orwell pub (currently closed) and various Wigan Pier-themed businesses, and which are now being packaged as a future Wigan Pier Quarter.

It was calming to suddenly be by the canal, away from development projects and traffic. Wigan people are friendly and everyone said hello. At a post telling us we were 35 miles from Liverpool and 92¼ miles from Leeds, we bumped into Ross – a cyclist riding the length of the canal for Zoe’s Place, the baby hospice charity.

The main Leeds & Liverpool canal heads north for Blackburn. We turned on to the Leigh branch, which soon took us into the Wigan flashes – eight shallow wetlands created by subsidence owing to coal mining. Hosting rare temperate Atlantic rainforest, the flashes are rich in birdlife; in the cooler seasons you can see – or hear – herons, tufted ducks, grebes and pochard, and possibly bitterns. Willow tits are the dream spot among the passerines. Two years ago, 13 of the wetlands, formally known as the Flashes of Wigan and Leigh, became a 738-hectare (1,823-acre) national nature reserve. It’s an amazing world of open water, reedbed, fen, woodland and scrub – all resulting, just like the canals, from industry and now turned over to conservation and carbon storage.

Some people will want to pull out their binoculars and loiter at the flashes. I like my walks to take in human-made rough edges. I was not disappointed. This section of the GM Ringway passes under or over rail and road bridges, skirts housing estates and light industrial units and crosses mono-agricultural fields – the signature landscape of the West Lancashire Plain.

We lunched in Viridor Wood – a site once occupied by the Mains colliery, closed in 1960, and a dairy farm; before those, a dead straight path for coffin-bearers passed through. Now there are meandering tracks and picnic benches.

Neighbouring Three Sisters is named after three large slagheaps that stood beside Garswood Hall colliery; it contains a child-friendly Enchanted Tree trail, complete with fairy houses. Mind you, the whispering of pixies and twittering of birds had to compete with car noises as the area is home to a race circuit for go-karts, cars and motorbikes.

In open country, we caught teasing views of Winter Hill and its television mast, and moorlands towards Rochdale and Bury – stages of the GM Ringway I’d like to walk one day.

We eventually came to Pennington Flash, the largest body of water in the area, at the heart of a country park. We met less than a dozen people during the walk. Suddenly there were hundreds, watching ducks, walking dogs, queuing for coffee.

We jumped on the 609 bus to get back from Leigh to Wigan. The walks work best for those coming out of Manchester by train, bus or tram and returning using the same. For those of us from Lancashire and elsewhere, getting back from B to A is a challenge on some of the sections of the Ringway. But it’s not a reason to put anyone off, and if the idiot-proof GoJauntly trail app could be enhanced with a few bus-stop tips, it would save shoe leather and end-of-hike anxiety.

In the north-west, Ringway was once what locals called Manchester airport. It’s fitting and fabulous that it’s now the name of a low-carbon, ultra-local, urban-dweller-friendly circular long-distance trail. Come on Liverpool, surely you can chart a 201-mile walk from Southport to Wirral.