READERS have been sharing their reaction to the demolition of four of the cooling towers at Fiddler's Ferry.

Two have sent poems to mark the occasion.

Rhiannon Owens, who has lived in Runcorn, Warrington and Widnes, said she was moved to tears watching the demolition live stream.

You were an eyesore

but an impressive one

and you were our eyesore...

 

You were jobs, livelihoods

Bread and butter

You graced the front

Of every local band's album cover...

 

Though perhaps not as much as the bridge

but that's another story

This is your moment of glory!

 

You were always there

Familiar

You were home

I'd see you from every vantage point

Wherever I roamed...

 

How can something be gone

Like it never existed before

A deep rumbling

Then just debris

No longer our eyesore...

 

So housing is planned

Over the greenbelt land

An anticlimax today

That we'd all talked about for hours...

 

and some of us cheer and some of us mourn

and many will raise a glass to that lost monolith

In the Eight Towers...

 

Because

 

You were an eyesore

but an impressive one

and you were our eyesore...

Rhiannon Owens

Meanwhile Archie McClusky says the event being shrouded in fog was apt.

The accused awaits its fate. The game was up.

Its crimes precede the prosecution, now a dusty remnant of a of a lost generation, no longer protected by ignorance.

It stood weak before them, a shell, unfit for domination.

Its days were numbered; alibis long gone, enlightenment the damning testimony.

Marched before the press in the most public of trials, the verdict was inexorable, its sentence terminal.

The day arrives.

Crowds in their thousands gather to watch its demise.

Degenerate, flask-wielding, camping chair-bound sadists; pointing lens and finger toward the doomed.

They are the guilty; creating the monster, feeding its habit.

Exposed in its lofty position, the guilty can do nothing to stop the greedy eyes of a region in its final hour.

They want a show, they smell blood.

With the throngs now assembled, the bell tolls.

Until, at the last, reprieve.

A thick curtain descends to mask what is now to be a more intimate affair.

Long hidden as it defined an era in plain sight, its dying moments now deny even that.

The axe comes down with a thunderous noise, but no blood is sighted, no limp fall from grace visible.

One, last victory.

The masses decamp and trudge away shivering, breathing clouds of dissatisfaction.

A dignified end.

Archie McCluskey

Billinge