Chorley and South Ribble History Pages

 I am a strictly casual birdwatcher. I own an ornithologist’s telescope and occasionally spend time in hides, but not for long and not with much success – I have to rely on others to identify most sightings. I am certainly not a ‘twitcher’, and was not even tempted by the recent appearanceof a rare belted kingfisher at Brockholes nature reserve . But I like spotting birds, and for years have taken my binoculars with me on my many walks around Whittle-le-Woods and have maintained a bird feeding station outside my living room window. I have seen and appreciated a wide range of birds, and have noticed the changes in bird populations that have occurred over the thirty-five years that I have lived in Whittle. In this article, I will set out the results of my years of casual ornithology.   My musings were inspired by a recent article by the writer Stephen Moss, who remarked that he had seen 100 bird species within a mile ofhis home . Now Stephen Moss is a professional naturalist and seri

On 31 October 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the chapel door of the University of Wittenburg. It was a document that became known as the ’95 Theses’, and was the first iteration of what would become Protestantism. Luther’s ideas struck a chord among Europeans who were tiring of the authoritarianism, hideboundness and corruption of the medieval Catholic Church. By the end of the 16 th Century, Protestantism was rivalling Catholicism across Europe.   The rise of Protestantism was not, of course unchallenged, and where it became dominant, Catholicism did not disappear. In England, Lancashire became a refuge of the Catholic faith, and the old religion continued below the surface of the county throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this article I will outline the changing relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in Tudor and Stuart England, and will focus on the survival of Catholicism in Lancashire in general, and in Chorl

 When were Britain’s canals at their busiest? I dare say most people would nominate the early years of the nineteenth century, when the canal network was at its height, and the railways hadn’t yet begun to take their traffic. But they would be wrong, for the answer is – today. According to a recent article , there are more boats on our canals and rivers now than at the height of the industrial revolution. Of course, the vast majority are leisure or house boats, rather than the freight barges that once dominated the canals, but the nation’s waterways are clearly thriving.   Not all canals, however, made the transition from nineteenth century industrial transport arteries to twenty-first century leisure facilities. Some were abandoned once their original function became obsolete and were subsequently filled in or built over. One such was the South End of the Lancaster Canal, which ran from Whittle Springs, through the centre of Whittle-le-Woods, to a terminus at Walton Summit, from w