Lancashire Westmorland Highway - With Byways and Footways for the Curious Traveller

By Jessica Lofthouse

A fantastic travel book for the keen walker wishing to explore some of the most beautiful and rugged landscapes in northern England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473386174

Book preview

Liverpool—Ormskirk—Penwortham Road

Warrington—Winwick—Wigan to Walton Highway

THE HIGHROAD TO THE NORTH

TWO centuries ago, when travelling for pleasure was a very new thing and only indulged in by the fortunate, leisured few, travellers took to the roads agog with curiosity, willing to be diverted, delighted, horrified by the sights they saw. A century ago, when railroads opened up the pleasures of travel to the many, they also set out ready to be interested in all they looked on. Travel was still a pleasure in itself, and the great, wide, wonderful world rushing past the railway carriage windows a revelation. They were of the mind of the writer who said, For my part I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. The present century, because it is a century of travel, because people would rather be somewhere different from where they are, has produced the enduring, long-suffering traveller who must go from A to Z, is anxious only to get from A to Z, and cares nothing about what there is at B, C, D, or at any intermediate point in his journey. From B to Y he is hidden behind the ramifications of newspapers and magazines; he even supplies his offspring with comics so that they might not be unduly bored with the tedious journey.

There is a story children read called Eyes and No Eyes. Some of us go through life with our eyes shut. I used to travel from Preston to Lancaster and Kendal without the least pleasurable anticipation in the road before me; I was much too preoccupied with the keener delights of Lakeland waiting across Morecambe Bay to pay much attention to the busy highway. I travelled too quickly to notice anything. Later, when I was writing Lancashire’s Fair Face, I started many of my days walking at various points along A6 between Preston and Lancaster. I began to discover so much that was fascinating, so many Lancashire bygones and so much lovely countryside within a short distance of the highroad that I decided to continue northwards along the same road, exploring as I went, tracking down the history of town and village, seeing where each byway and each footpath ended.

This led me, on foot, by bus, by car, from Lancaster to Kendal, by three routes and through some of the loveliest countryside in North Lancashire and South Westmorland, and on again over Shap Fells to Penrith, through sun, shower, cloudburst and hill fog, along the new highway, along the old Shap road which is grass-grown and unused except by farmers and curious walkers like myself, eager to walk with history, until at Eamont Bridge and the Cumberland border I decided to call it a day.

As I travelled the highways and byways, from Preston to Penrith, and later from the Mersey to the Ribble, along routes bringing people from the south and midlands through Warrington and Wigan, or from Liverpool and Ormskirk, to Preston, I kept in mind my first plan, to find out how much of the past lingered into the present and to discover all that was interesting, beautiful, historic or just curious, along them. I assumed that most of us are road-users not by choice, but necessity, and that most travellers are prompted by the desire to know what lies just over the hill, just round the corner. This desire has lured me from the highroad into a score of delightful valleys and along many wild and lonely dales. And all lie waiting for the wanderer to leave the buzzing, roaring, speeding, overtaking stream of traffic along A6.

The best of this road is only for the slow traveller. Four hours’ journey in a hurry, skimming across the landscape—but four years of wandering, and I know there are still limitless discoveries to be made on and off the beaten track.

In writing this book, I have collected all the relevant information I could from the writings of topographers and travel writers who journeyed along this highway before me. First of all, I scanned old maps—Saxton’s, John Speed’s, and Ogilby’s strip maps of 1674—his route from the Mersey at Warrington to the Eamont at Penrith being almost identical with the direct line of my highway to the north. Yates’ one-inch maps of Lancashire were invaluable, for on these I found detailed all the features in which I am most interested—wayside inns, toll-gates, windmills, watermills, and, of course, all the buildings prior to 1786 which are among the delights of the roadside to-day—the Georgian mansions, Queen Anne and Jacobean period farm-houses and halls of early seventeenth and sixteenth century date. I followed his highroads—often on foot, for they are the byways of the twentieth century, little used after the making of modern by-pass roads.

I read what Leland had to say of Tudor Lancashire and Camden’s comments on seventeenth-century towns and villages—Dr. Kuerden’s too, and Richard James’ Lancashire Journey in rhyme, written in 1636. For movements up and down the highway in the Civil War years I read Civil War Tracts in the Chetham publications and the invaluable and very readable Discourse of the Warr in Lancashire, written by one who was an eye-witness of the fights and skirmishes, Colonel Robinson, of Buckshaw near Chorley. For through journeys from Mersey to the Ribble, the Lune and the Kent, I consulted the Journal of Mrs. Celia Fiennes of 1698 and Daniel Defoe’s Tour through England and Wales, which tell of conditions in the early years of George I, Lancashire Delineated—a detailed journey written by Britten in 1818, and Pictorial History of Lancashire, the work of several writers, published by Routledge in 1844. For histories of particular places, I delved into the Victoria County History of Lancashire, in the volumes devoted to the Hundreds of Salford, Leyland, Blackburn, Amounderness and Lonsdale, Abram’s Blackburn, Fishwick’s Preston, Whittle’s Bolton le Moors. I found two old volumes—A Description of Preston in 1686, and a slim book combining various accounts of Lancaster in 1807. Among diaries, those of Peter Walkden (1725), Edward Tyldesley of Myerscough, and the autobiography of William Stout, a Lancaster grocer in the eighteenth century, brought the past to life. I must not leave out two books by Hewitson (Atticus), Our Country Churches and Northward, invaluable for pictures of Lancashire life in Victorian times. For news items of 1800-50 Leaves from the Lancaster Gazette gave me fascinating titbits—about coaching days, highwaymen, footpads, tragedies and murders, hangings and assize trials—and rumours of change to come with the railway era. Going north, Lucas’ History of Warton, written 1710-44, proved most enlightening in its descriptions of traditions and customs of this northern corner of Lancashire. Mrs. Ford’s Annals of Yealand (1911) and Pape’s Washingtons of Warton (1950) filled in the picture with memories, traditions and historical record. In travelling through Westmorland, I found the great tome, Antiquities of Westmorland, gave me all I wanted to know about prehistory, ancient monuments, old halls, farm-houses—down to the scraps of wood panelling, carving and stonework preserved in the smallest wayside cottage; a wonderful book.

LIVERPOOL—PRESTON HIGHWAY

CITY STREETS TO CORNFIELDS

Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon; shopping crowds so densely packed on city pavements that one might have walked on their heads; in Scotland Road purposeful crowds travelling in two directions—one citywards, one towards Walton and Everton, and the football grounds. In Walton village the crowds slowed down again to pavement loitering and shop-window gazing. The blitzed and battered church of Walton-on-the-Hill, a grimy shell in a sad and sorry graveyard, watched our departure from Liverpool. Once it was a proud and ancient edifice, mother church and centre of a wide parish within the boundaries of which stood the village of Liverpool—a fishing community of little consequence clustered by a Merseyside creek. In time, Walton Church, re-edified, will rise proudly once more above the great highway to the north.

Now the people thin out; we pass through Warbreck Moor towards Aintree, passing modern factories, modern housing estates and The Racecourse. There is nothing beautiful, nor romantic, nor dramatic on this northern exit from Liverpool, but one journey I made along this road stands out in clear detail as though it happened only yesterday. It followed the evacuation of Dunkirk. I lived and worked in Liverpool then—a stirring though tragic period in the city’s history. For a while—a brief while—it became the hub of the universe. One week we watched bewildering events—saw weary trainloads of soldiers stagger from Lime-street station, watched an imposing array of V.I.P.s in operatic uniforms never seen in England before, coming and going on the steps of the Midland Adelphi. They were the leaders and officials from countries overrun by the Nazis.

We pondered silently on the shipping piling in the Mersey and unloading tens of thousands of men into a strange country. They were the remnants of Allied armies—the survivors of shipwrecks—their eyes those of men whose hope had gone. Aintree Racecourse had been barricaded, barbed-wire fences were surrounding it—tents sprang up within to shelter the homeless. Then it was we read the horrors of war in the faces of the streams of men we passed on the Aintree road—more like ghosts than men, faces blank, eyes lifeless, feet dragging, and clad in a rag-bag assortment of clothes.

They were different from the thousands who followed them as tenants of Aintree—the French Navy, jaunty even in eclipse, who within two days of the Bordeaux Government’s signing of armistice with Hitler had answered Mr. Churchill’s appeal to all Free Frenchmen to join the Allies. On June 24th, Liverpool was full of them, tables were set in Scotland Road’s mean side-streets for their refreshment, Everton’s doors were open to them, and on the canal towpath at Aintree what did I see but scores of men—still wearing their sailor caps with red pom-poms—kneeling at the water-edge, stripped to the waist, all vigorously washing their clothes, just as one sees Frenchwomen doing by the river banks in Normandy and Brittany. Then the mariners went away as the Central Europeans had done, to be followed by men from more Allied nations, armies ready for embarkation, prisoners of war, more refugees—for five years they came to Aintree and after a while went away. And who remembers them now?

The highway has seen many changes. The account a traveller of the 1840’s gave in his Pictorial History of Lancashire shows how far it has changed.

Passing out of Liverpool we proceed along a paved road—all are paved with small stones for miles together and cause the most disagreeable jolting in a carriage and to the pedestrian a sensation in the feet by no means agreeable—we reach the village of Walton having a pleasant view of the country on the right hand side, well-wooded and relieved by many abodes of mercantile splendour and opulence.

Liverpool’s merchant princes do not dwell here now, and the great mansions of the Seftons and Derbys—the Molyneux and Stanley families who divided Liverpool and Liverpool’s history equally between them—are well away to the east at Knowsley and Croxteth Hall. As for countryside, we must pass well beyond the new housing estate fringe before we can begin to see it as country.

Beyond the flat land across which the River Alt meanders—it was well named muddy river by the Britons, and Altcar equally well deserved its name as a marsh by the muddy river—all was once swampy land and, though the waters have been drained away, it often has its acres blurred by pale mistiness out of which trees appear in silhouette and church spires are grey cut-outs—reminiscent of Norfolk or Lincolnshire. Going north to Maghull, Town Green and Aughton, the landscape never suggests Lancashire to a stranger who has not realized how much of the county and how many of its people are wholly occupied in feeding her. There is not a yard of wasted land, all is well farmed, geometrically divided and sub-divided into pasture, arable, corn and roots, with field boundaries marked by ruler-straight dykes and drains, or well-clipped, close-knit thorn hedges or windbreaks of slender poplars, pointing taper fingers to heaven like the many village churches of lowland Lancashire.

Maghull (which was Magele in the Domesday book—from a word meaning mayweed) is charming, a long street with a grass strip for green, a pleasant mixture of old and new, and near at hand the placid waters of the canal, beyond which gulls scream above the ploughman as the tractor turns the rich brown earth. Perhaps we do not realize how much Lancashire gained with the draining of its miasmatic marshes until we take this journey north across it. Its miles of peat marshes, useless meres, breeding ground for marsh fevers, covered West Lancashire until the eighteenth century, when progressive and far-seeing landlords began to devise drainage schemes. One was starting reclamation as early as the 1690’s. Mrs. Fiennes, in 1698, wrote that Mr. Fleetwood of Bank Hall has been at great expense to shutt out the waters. The most successful reclaimer of these marshes was living at Scarisbrick Hall in the 1790’s. Thomas Eccles-ton, a great promoter of improvements in every kind of agriculture. For his good work, he gained a gold medal from the Society of Arts—and the gift of a fine Merino ram from the king’s flock.

The earliest communities—and there were several of great age, including Sefton with its parish church so old that not only did fighting Molyneux thank God therein for safe return from the victory of Flodden Field but their ancestors also knelt there, centuries earlier, in thanksgiving for their homecoming from the Crusades—must have been islanded after winter rains.

Aughton was built at higher level—the oak town of Anglian settlers who chose a site near the earthworks of Celts or earlier tribes. The red sandstone height gives Aughton a feeling of uplift. I should think Aughtonians always thought themselves one better than the moss dwellers down below on the plains. Its older church was a centre of religious life over a thousand years ago, when an Anglian cross was set up there. Norman architects built another church on the spot, fourteenth-century builders added the unusual spire, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century parishioners saw the rebuilding of walls that age had rendered insecure. From the churchyard, early villagers watched the community of Norse settlers taking shape on another height two miles northwards. They called it after Orme, who erected a church thereon. Ormschirche was its twelfth-century name.

ORMSKIRK

From earliest years, Ormskirk was always associated in my mind with nice things to eat—as were Eccles and Goosnargh and Bury and Everton. My mother would tell how she and her little brothers and sisters used to await most eagerly the return of my grandfather from his annual visit to the Grand National with his pockets bulging with gingerbreads—donkeys of gingerbread for the youngest—purchased from sellers who met trains drawing up on Ormskirk station. I have never seen gingerbread offered for sale there, but a century ago it would seem that visitors were besieged by girls crying, Buy my fine Ormskirk gingerbread—the best is made here!

RAINHEAD 1718

One traveller wrote: Scarcely had we alighted at the Talbot Inn when we were offered by half-a-dozen fair hands together, little packets of gingerbread, in the way of purchase. The girls, he declared, came nearer the idea we had formed of Lancashire witches, from their witchery, than any of the sex we had before seen——. Entering Ormskirk from Liverpool at the upper end of Aughton Street is the Gingerbread Shop, a building graced, moreover, by one of the best designed rainwater heads I know—letters and heraldic device embossed thereon as well as the date 1718.

In the windows the flat gingerbread donkeys are still lined up for sale.

I remember the old gingerbread women, an old native of Ormskirk told me. There was Mrs. Caterall, and Mrs. Rimmer, and Mrs. Fyldes and Annie Shaw. They used to trot down to the station with their three-cornered shawls, and baskets of gingerbread over their arms. Sixpence a packet their gingerbreads were but you could always buy broken biscuits much cheaper. As children, we used to like gingerbread houses best.

Seventy years ago, the children of Ormskirk looked forward to the Fair. Happy days!—a great Cow Fair one day, the Horse Fair on the next—in Moor Street, and, best of all, Fine Fair on the Thursday with roundabouts, stalls, fairings—and ginger-breads.

ORMSKIRK CHURCH

I like Ormskirk. It has character and its own atmosphere. Saturday sees it in its busiest rôle—market town catering for crowds who flock here, up from the lowlands, down from the hills at Ashurst, Dalton and Parbold. The stalls, with gay assortment of produce, stand side by side, facing to the jostling countryfolk who pack the pavements of Moor Street—such a place for baskets digging into one’s ribs. The street market stretches from the Golden Lion to the Lord Beaconsfield statue and Lord Derby clock-tower, but beyond, Church Street narrows to curve round the hill-top churchyard and provides its own traffic problems; a perfect place for jams, but how very satisfying to a traveller not in a hurry. The houses and shops on Church Hill have not been touched by modernity, they are still graced by early Victorian and Regency shop fronts—the typical Christmas-card picture.

Orme did well when he chose this windy eminence for his kirk. Little of his foundation remains—the chancel and a Norman door are the earliest relics—and there was a great deal of repair work done early in the eighteenth century, but, nevertheless, one glance is enough to tempt the interested traveller to further study. The most incurious note the unusual monstrosity in architecture, a spire and tower standing side by side at the west end, and, asking why, receive two answers, depending on whether the informant has a bias towards the romantic or the historic. A visitor a century ago was told that two maiden ladies repaired or reconstructed the church in the present grotesque manner, because they could not agree about connecting the towers together. So have generations of Ormskirk townsfolk believed. The true reason is not far to seek. To the north-east of the town on a gentle slope of the hills lie the fragmentary ruins of Burscough Priory—one sees them and the adjacent farm from the railway carriage window—so scanty because after the Dissolution of this house of Black Canons much of the masonry was transplanted, including the impressive four-square priory church tower which was carried stone by stone to Orm’s Church, there to re-house the monastic bells.

The Stanleys founded the Priory, sojourned there, were buried there in the days when Lathom House and Knowsley Hall were their Lancashire homes. With the Priory in decay, they transferred their care and interest to Ormskirk, removing effigies of ancestors to the protection of the parish church. One broken figure may be from the tomb of Margaret of Richmond, second wife of Thomas Lord Stanley, who was created first Earl of Derby by his grateful stepson. Margaret was mother of Henry of Richmond, who became Henry VII and founder of the Tudor line of kings and queens. Thomas Stanley, we all know, picked up the crown of England from a thorn bush—where Richard III had mislaid it—on the battlefield of Bosworth, and placed it firmly on the head of his stepson. The same Henry, when king, visited Knowsley Hall and, tradition says, came to worship in the Priory of Burscough during his stay. He came to Ormskirk, too, where the King’s Choir in the church was so named after his visit.

The Derby chapel is a family history of the Stanleys from the sixteenth century. So many memories linger here. A few miles away was the old Lathom House—gone now, but linked for ever with the name of that courageous woman, Charlotte de Tremouille, who married the Royalist leader, James, Earl of Derby, and during his absence in the Isle of Man (after the 1643 defeat of his army at Read Bridge, near Whalley), bravely defended her home, helped only by a handful of men, household servants and boys, against a besieging army of Roundheads—for three months. She came to worship at Ormskirk—she gave the church its Derby font with the family eagle and child crest upon it—and is buried there beside the earl. When his sad cortège entered the church one dark day in 1651, the watching mourners saw how short was the coffin. His head, struck from his body by the executioner’s axe in Bolton market-place, was enclosed in a smaller casket.

From the Church Hill we look northwards to Burscough, eastwards to Lathom and south again to the Knowsley countryside—all land associated with the Stanleys. In the pleasant woods of Lathom, overlooked by the slopes of Dalton and Ashurst Hill, is the setting for the eagle and child legend. Walking there one day, Thomas, Lord of Lathom, and his lady wife found a baby boy in swaddling bands lying at the foot of a tall tree wherein eagles were wont to nest.

EAGLE AND CHILD

The child, in fact, a bastard son of Thomas, was taken home and brought up by his tender-hearted and unsuspecting wife, who swallowed the eagle story. Thomas, years later, wanted to make the boy his heir, thereby depriving his only daughter of her rights. Finally, she received her inheritance, wed a Stanley, and he, duly grateful, adopted the eagle and child as his crest.

Of Lathom House much has been written, but none of the descriptions apply to the modern hall. The seventeenth-century house before the Civil War was like a little Toun in itself . . . the glory of the county! Henry VII, it was said, restored Richmond Palace like unto Lathom House. The Lords of Lathom were esteemed by most about them with little less respect than kings.

NORTH ACROSS THE MOSS LANDS

We travel north towards the next community of Burscough, the skogr or wood by the old burg, a village of pretty cottages, brick-built houses and farms, an antiquated stump of a windmill adjoining an old miller’s house and rising high above the banks of the wide canal, modern corn-mills with queues of barges loading there and a dusty smell of flour and meal in the air. Burscough’s flat acres are rich, black earth won from the old peat mosses.

Rufford, the rough ford of the River Douglas, has its Georgian houses and quiet village street beautified most gloriously by the golden rain of one great beech-tree—its Old Hall, home of the Heskeths long ago, standing in the quiet of a tree-filled garden and with drifts of autumn leaves piled against its walls. It also has reclaimed marshes stretching for miles northwards, flat land with only occasional wind-bent trees and a few red farms with corn-stacks and granaries clustered on low platforms raised above flood-level. The wind rages from the west, sweeping across cultivated fields where once it troubled the waters of a great mere. There is an air of melancholy here still, especially on a grey day in November, when the withered sedges whisper and no birds sing.

Since writing Lancashire Landscape in 1947-8, when I visited Rufford Hall and told of some of its attractions, I have heard from Mr. G. M. Brown, who has worked with a friend, Mr. Alan Keen, in unearthing some very fascinating material concerning the lost years in the life of William Shakespeare. In a section devoted to the Hall i’ th’ Wood at Bolton, I said, This is not Stratford and Bolton has no immortal bard to honour, but, writes Mr. Brown, it is established, I think, beyond reasonable doubt, that the immortal bard of Stratford was at one time at Lea with Alexander Hoghton and later spent some years at Rufford Old Hall, which has been described as the nursery of genius.

Mr. Keen, in his researches, has found proof that a William Shakeshafte was a singing boy in the household of Alexander Hoghton of Lea, near Preston, in the 1570’s; in 1581, he was mentioned in his master’s will with a legacy of a year’s wages and a commendation to the notice of Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford Hall. The next year Shakespeare was courting Anne Hathaway and renewing old boyhood friendships at Stratford; he was married and a father before he again left Warwickshire. Did he then come north to Lancashire?

There has been for a very long time an oral tradition that Shakespeare lived at Rufford Hall when young. Mr. Keen believes that in 1585 the young man, now as an actor, was one of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s Players in his