Rediscovering the Red Rose County
When William Blake wrote about ‘Jerusalem’ being built among England’s pleasant pastures, mountains green and dark satanic mills, he could have been describing the landscape of 19th-century Lancashire.
And 200 years on, Lancashire is still a land of contrasts: of populous former mill towns and a varied 130-mile stretch of coastline backed by stunning countryside. Perhaps surprisingly, given its key role within the history of the Industrial Revolution, four-fifths of the ‘Red Rose County’ remains rural. Bordered by the Lake District to the north and the Yorkshire Dales to the east, Lancashire’s countryside is redolent of both – a mix of moorland, stone wall-bounded fells and valleys, saltmarshes and waterways, all threaded with walking trails.
Before industrialisation, Lancashire’s early history embraced Roman and Viking settlements, Saxon homesteads and Norman conquerors – and it was from the red rose symbol adopted in the 14th century by John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, that the
