Chat Moss is a large area of peat bog that makes up part of the City of Salford, Metropolitan Borough of Wigan and Trafford in Greater Manchester, England.

In 1958 workers extracting peat discovered the severed head of what is believed to be a Romano-British Celt, possibly a sacrificial victim, in the eastern part of the bog near Worsley.

Also the A580 crosses the bog, forming Leigh, Lowton and Astley's (Wigan MBC)'s boundary with Warrington, Culcheth and Glazebury, Croft, and Kenyon.

The surface, at a distance, looks black and dirty, and is indeed frightful to think of, for it will bear neither horse or man, unless in an exceeding dry season, and then not so as to be passable, or that any one should travel over them ... What nature meant by such a useless production, 'tis hard to imagine; but the land is entirely waste, excep ... for the poor cottagers fuel, and the quantity used for that is very small.

[8]Chat Moss presented a significant challenge to the engineers constructing the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1826 because of the difficulty in providing a solid base for the track, in particular at a location known as Blackpool Hole.

Narrow gauge track – which allowed the weight of the wagons to be spread evenly across an area of the bog – was temporarily laid down and then picked up and relaid elsewhere as needed.

[13] Roscoe was declared bankrupt in 1821, but the reclamation work continued under the stewardship of others who took over his leasehold interest, amongst them William Baines, the anti-Corn Law MP and owner of the Leeds Mercury newspaper.

The problem was exacerbated by a gradual switch from the 1870s onwards from the older cesspit methods of sewage disposal to pail closets, which required regular emptying.

The final price paid by the corporation was £137,531 7s 1d (equivalent to £18.7 million in 2023[a])[17] Refuse was carried on barges down the Manchester Ship Canal as far as Boysnope Wharf, where it was loaded onto a light railway system to be taken into the moss for dumping.

[18] Farmers on Chat Moss were legally required by their tenancy agreements to accept a specified amount of refuse on their land, and were even obliged to pay for it.

[21] A scheme was devised during the Second World War to protect major cities from enemy bombing by lighting decoy fires on nearby open land.

The condition of the tooth pulp suggested that Worsley Man was 26–45 years old at the time of his death, which radiocarbon dating of a fragment of preserved soft tissue indicated was during the late Iron Age, sometime around 121 to 251 AD, identifying him as a Romano-British Celt.

[24] At 53°27′46″N 2°25′54″W / 53.46278°N 2.43167°W / 53.46278; -2.43167 (53.4629, -2.4316), Chat Moss lies at the southern edge of the Lancashire Plain, an area of Bunter sandstones overlaid with marls laid down during the Late Triassic period.

In areas where drainage is poor, water-logging can slow down plant decomposition, producing peat, which over the years can raise the level of the bog above that of the surrounding land.

[30] The major habitats in the moss are bog, heathland, woodland and acidic grassland, subject to varying degrees of wetness depending on the local drainage.

[6] The domestic and industrial waste dumped on Chat Moss resulted in very high levels of heavy metals such as lead and copper in the soil, raising concerns that crops grown there may pose a health risk.

At a meeting held on 30 June 2011 Salford Council decided not to renew the permission, and on 1 August obtained a court order prohibiting any further extraction pending an appeal by the companies involved.

[33] In 1994 the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who was born in Salford, wrote a seven-minute tone poem for school orchestra, titled Chat Moss.

Hampson chose Chat Moss as their subject because of its 19th-century historical significance as the site of the world's first passenger railway and its "anti-picturesque appearance",[36] a "nondescript landscape of stumpy trees and expanses of grass".