Bowdon Wakes

On 8th October 1859 the Warrington Guardian reported 'Bowdon Wakes - This annual feasting season commenced last Sunday. No doubt the origin of Bowdon wakes might be strongly defended, and historic evidence deduced to prove that in the onset it was a joyous festivity, commemorative of the dedication or some other important event in connection with Bowdon Church, and as such would be unassociable with anything of a vicious nature. But if one of the slumbering dead of that period could have been brought forth to witness the doings of last Sabbath, as the celebration of the feast of the Church, what would have been his feeling? Would not his idea of man's grovelling sensual tendency have been doubly increased? It is a thousand pities that our otherwise orderly, peaceful Sabbath, should be subject to this annual innovation. Well may one be roused to feelings of indignation, when the scenes of last Sunday come before us, crowded with oaths and blasphemies and reckless desecration of God's holy day . . . Now for the facts of the case; Though the visitors to Bowdon, on Sunday last were not so numerous as on some former occasions, yet from about eight o'clock in the morning, until ten or eleven at night, the neighbourhood was in complete uproar. The crowds brought from Manchester by train were immense, whilst the road was scarcely ever free from vehicles of one kind or another, many of them overloaded with men and women, singing and brawling as though the occasion had been a bull-bait, or a cock-fight'.