Chorley and South Ribble History Pages

My son and his family recently moved into a house in Bury Lane, Withnell. It has everything a young professional family needs: four bedrooms, three bathrooms (one en-suite), fitted kitchen, car parking, etc, etc. But it was not always so, for their house is nearly 150 years old. In this article I will trace the early history of the house, in the context of the industrial history of Withnell township.   The bottom of Bury Lane, Withnell Why is it there? – Withnell in the 19 th Century The ancient township of Withnell is a 3,000 acre slab of upland on the edge of the West Pennine moors. Prior to the 19 th century it was almost exclusively livestock-rearing agricultural land, speckled with small, family-run farms, and little hamlets known as ‘folds’. There were no villages, no churches and no industry, other than some small-scale coal mining (of which more later), and quarrying. There was no manor house, or ‘Lord of the Manor’; the landowners lived elsewhere.   By th...

 Embroidered everywhere with richest dyes, And curtained o'er with soft and cloudless skies; Encircled with a zone of beauteous things, A place of pleasure,—welcome Whittle Springs! John Critchley Prince, 1856   Who doesn’t love a spa? Who could resist the allure of a wellness weekend in a luxury hotel, with a pool and Jacuzzi, accompanied by the delights of a detoxifying seaweed wrap, a gel overlay manicure, full body exfoliation, hot tone reflexology and colonic hydrotherapy, all with the refreshing aroma of a Gwyneth Paltrow vagina-scented candle? Well, me, actually, but that’s because I’m a grumpy old man. The wellness industry, based in modern spas, employs millions of people world-wide and generates billions of dollars in revenue. It taps into a deep-seated vein in the human psyche, which has long regarded water, especially mineral water, as a therapeutic agent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spas, in the traditional sense of the word, were at the c...