Edenfield Through Time

By John Simpson

For more than 130 years, photographers have been recording life in Edenfield, Turn, Stubbins, Irwell Vale and Ewood Bridge. Like most places in Lancashire, these villages have long histories stretching back to the sixteenth century and beyond. For many years, people hereabouts made a living from hill farming and handloom weaving, until industrialisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought water-powered and steam-driven mills to the neighbourhood. The period photographs in this book allow us to open a window to previous generations, showing long-vanished buildings, changing modes of transport and people at work and play. Accompanying them are up-to-date pictures, which show the area at the start of the twenty-first century and the profound changes that have taken place since our grandparents and great grandparents first ventured out with their cameras to capture village life on film.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781445628066

John Simpson

John Simpson has been the BBC's World Affairs Editor for more than half his fifty-two year career. In his time with the BBC, he has reported on major events all over the world, and was made a CBE in the Gulf War honours list in 1991. He has twice been the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year, and has won three BAFTAs, a News and Current Affairs award and an Emmy. He lives in Oxford.

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Introduction

Edenfield sits on a shelf of land, the valley of the River Irwell at its feet and the heights of Dearden Moor at its back. With its stone-built houses, shops and churches it is easy to see it as simply a product of the time in Rossendale’s past when hundreds of people worked in cotton mills or in nearby quarries and coalmines. But it has an older story too of well-to-do families in large houses, of dairy and sheep farming and of land enclosures from the bleak moorlands.

Edenfield’s neighbours, Ewood Bridge, Strongstry, Stubbins and Chatterton too have old cores, with more recent layers on top. In contrast, Turn and Irwell Vale are relative newcomers. Turn (or to give it its full name, Turn i’ th’ Lane) grew up in the nineteenth century where the turnpike road to Rochdale cut across a bend in the old highway to Bury. By the end of the century, it had two cotton mills, a school, co-operative shop, pub and several rows of houses. In the early 1830s, Manchester merchant John Bowker created a completely new village at Irwell Vale when he set aside flat meadows near the confluence of the Rivers Ogden and Irwell as the site for a cotton mill and two rows of cottages.

Changes to the traditional way of life in the villages began in the eighteenth century with the appearance of water-powered mills at Dearden Clough, Ewood Bridge, Stubbins and Chatterton. They were soon joined by a network of new turnpike roads from Blackburn, Burnley, Bury, Bolton and Rochdale, all of which met in the village. The coming of the railways in the nineteenth century opened up new markets not only for cloth from local mills, but also for the building stone found in abundance in the surrounding hills. By the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of tons of stone shipped out from quarries at Scout Moor and Horncliffe found their way to towns throughout Lancashire and beyond. New houses, churches and pubs brought more changes to the landscape, creating the villages that are so familiar to us.

Change has continued and the rapid pace of the past fifty years or so has swept away many well-known scenes. Gone are most of the cotton mills, demolished or converted to other uses; the quarries have fallen silent; farms have amalgamated and in some cases land enclosed from the commons has reverted to rough pasture. At the same time, alterations to our way of life mean that we will no longer see the multitude of leisure activities, which once kept people entertained. Nevertheless, church groups, sports clubs and other voluntary organisations such as Edenfield and District Horticultural Society still keep alive something of the spirit of the times when villagers largely made their own entertainment.

In spite of the process of change, we