Chorley and South Ribble History Pages

When we think of English villages, we tend to think of leafy clusters of thatched and timber-framed cottages surrounding a quiet green, looked over by a 13 th century church and perhaps a Tudor manor house. The villagers would in ancient times have worked on the local farms. Such villages do exist in Lancashire, however, much more common are the somewhat less picturesque villages that were founded during the Industrial Revolution and which owe their existence to manufacturing. In this article I will look around Wheelton, a small, self-contained industrial village between Chorley and Blackburn which developed in the mid-19 th century around a cotton mill, offering it as a classic example of this kind of community. The Creation of Wheelton Village The township of Wheelton is an area of rolling, grassy hills in central Lancashire, on the far western edge of the Pennines. Along with its neighbouring township of Heapey, it was sparsely populated prior to the 19 th century. Part ...

A few years ago, I took an Open University module entitled “Introduction to Geology”. Now, I like academic study and I’m good at it, but this module was the hardest I’ve ever attempted. I’m used to the humanities and the social sciences and dealing mostly with people or concepts. The hard science (no pun intended) of rocks and minerals taxed my understanding and I only got a C as my final grade. However, I enjoyed the module very much and it enabled me to answer the question posed in the title of this article: why are the local quarries situated where they are (and why are there so many of them)? I will focus mainly on Whittle-le-Woods (hereafter Whittle), but I will also consider the neighbouring townships of Brindle, Hoghton and Clayton-le-Woods. The History of Quarrying in the Whittle Area There have long been quarries in Whittle and the surrounding area, extracting stone for building and making millstones, and also extracting sand and gravel. Local legend has it that the...

In 1982, an academic conference was held at Oxford University, the proceedings of which were later published as a book entitled Medieval Villages: A Review of Current Work . One contributor to the conference was Michael A. Aston, then a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, later better known as Professor Mick Aston of Channel 4’s Time Team . Another contributor was Mary A. Atkin, who described herself as a “former Senior Lecturer in Geography at Preston Polytechnic”. Mary Atkin achieved little future fame, but the paper she delivered at the conference, blandly entitled “Some settlement patterns in Lancashire”, forms the basis of this article. In it she set out a theory of the early woodland clearance and enclosure of land in the historic Hundred of Leyland. In the present article, I will outline Atkin’s ideas and will extend her theory to speculate about the early settlement of my home township of Whittle-le-Woods. In doing so, I will add some detail to my previous articl...