Hey, why wood you come here?

An iron gate, a bandstand, an old fountain, tennis courts. People walk their dogs around a boating lake all but freezing over. The odd squirrel scurries, the odd robin flits, from tree to leafless tree.

It’s winter, and I’m standing in Queen’s Park, in Heywood, a former mill town in Lancashire. (“Hey”, also spelled “hay” or “haigh”, is an old Anglo Saxon word for an enclosed clearing made in a wood. Heywood is also known as Monkey Town, for reasons which remain obscure.) I’d travelled here by bus from Rochdale, to visit my mother-in-law, and thought I’d take a look around before heading back to Manchester, and then to London.

The park, opened in 1879 and once a part of the Heywood Hall estate, is just one of Heywood’s somewhat gloomy, romantic features that are fascinating perhaps only to visitors with a melancholy disposition and to local historians.

For example, there is also the Church of St Luke the Evangelist, which stands in the centre of town, and which, somewhat bizarrely, Hitler greatly coveted. The local primary school, which my wife once attended. The local library, where her sister once worked. Victorian Gothic revival, both (the buildings, that is, not the women). Any number of old, mostly cotton, mills. Meadowcraft Mill and Miller’s Brook Mill are still, amazingly, in use (others were demolished long ago). Even the dilapidated Heywood Civic Centre is not without its down-at-heel charms.

I walk down the main street, York Street. The cafes and shops are cheerful enough. I enjoy a cheese pie with chips and mushy peas at the Make N Bake Cafe. I even pluck up enough courage to enter the local Wetherspoon’s, the Edwin Waugh, for a pint of ale.

I learn the pub is named after the 19th century dialect poet, who is still known as the Burns of Lancashire. (Back in London, I manage to find a book of his poems.)

Then it’s off to the local Tesco for some supplies for the ride back.

It starts to rain just as the small bus pulls up. I take a seat next to a woman who, she tells me in a thick Mancunian accent, is travelling from nearby Bury to Rochdale (Heywood lies roughly equidistant from each, on the A58), having been to the Bury Markets.

She laughs when I tell her I’m from Australia. “Wot would you want to come ‘ere for,” she asks. It’s a common question. And one you’re probably asking yourself.

If you’re a fan of The Smiths, you’ll know the answer.