I think all forums have a distinct pattern, whatever the subject.

Innocent/genuine comment or question
Some honest answers or comments
Someone takes exception or pontificates.
Someone defends or defines with a degree of knowledge.
Others who sit around waiting for an explotable situation wade in.
Others continue to try to keep the conversation sensible.
Final flattening off as tit for tat becomes tedious.

I always find Jim's replies interesting and informative whether in answer to someone, defending the truth or in exasperation and annoyance.

I made my own contribution in respect of attempting to shed light on a period that seems a bit grey in the overall history of the song. I firmly beleive in a cycle of life of about 5 or 6 years. That always seems to me when I look back on my own life, that over that period of time things tend to change and develop. By the time the 5 years have gone I'm on a diferent path and direction. Between the end of the war and say an arbitrary date of 1956 (tow cycles), when the Folk side of things really kicked in, for at least a part of it Ewan (by now) lived in a place vastly different from the town of Salford that he is more usually associated with. He was living almost on top of the artists Harry Rutherford and L S Lowry, in open countryside at the centre of one of the most important historical areas of the early, water powered Industrial Revolution.

Politically he was on top of the area that contributed more than most to the Chartist Movement, the early ancestor of the socialist movement.The fields of Peterloo were poulated by the inhabitants of the surrounding towns. His father by this time was in Stockport just a short distance away.He could see Kinder Scout to the south and Bleaklow's "frozen sea" to the east. Then, as now, the skies were populated by Skylarks and Lapwings.

You might have guessed I'm passionate about this bit of a hill. I simply cannot imagine that Ewan didn't live here without it being an essential part of everything he became, wrote and sang.

To the original posters who wondered what Dirty Old Town was about, you need to stand on Werneth Low and look about you and on the mighty towns that made up the North West of England, that powered the Indutrial Revolution and subsequently the world. You'll understand it all then(and a lot more).