Haskells: The Life and Death of a Whittle-le-Woods Farm
You would have to be a very long-term resident of Whittle-le-Woods to remember Haskell’s Farm. Its farmhouse and outbuildings were demolished in the early 1970s and its farmyard and fields are now covered by housing. It was a small family farm, little more than a smallholding, one of hundreds of such farms that covered the rolling hills that surrounded the east Lancashire textile manufacturing towns throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Most are now gone, their fields absorbed into larger concerns (or built upon) and their buildings torn down or converted into private houses. In this article I will chart the history of Haskell’s, as an example of this unsung but important aspect of Lancashire’s agricultural economy. Haskell's Farm is in the foreground of this early twentieth century photograph, taken from Dolphin Brow, with Waterhouse Green beyond. Note its "Laithe House" design, with the barn attached to the farmhouse. Note also its orchard and