Axes and Hammers -- Pilling’s Prehistoric Legacy: Part Two

So, in the last part of this article – doesn’t that sound impressive? This article…as though it’s all officious and legal like -- where was I? Oh yes, in the last part of this article we discussed some of the axes and adzes and bits and bobs of Neolithic/Bronze Age paraphernalia that have been unearthed around Pilling over the years.
We didn’t mention all of them, however. More have been discovered at Crookabreast Farm, Greengate Farm, Friars Hill, Ashtons Farm, Eskham House Farm, Kentucky Farm, Pea Hall Lane, Rough Holme Farm, Manor House Farm and the Bowers, amongst other places.
Pilling was a busy old place back in the Stone Age.
In fact there were so many axes in use back then that our Neolithic ancestors (most of them still going under the same five or six Pilling family names we all know and cherish nowadays no doubt) ended up chopping down all the forests that covered the area. That’s why Pilling is basically a bald and rather boggy place nowadays fit only for snorkelling sheep. (There’s a message in there somewhere, but I’m buggered if I can work out what.)
Onto hammers then, another important part of Neolithic Pilling-man’s tool kit. Hammers were used for all sorts of purposes, from countersinking poles to making more axes so that more trees could be chopped down and turned into poles to countersink.
Two perforated stone hammers were discovered at Pea Hall Wood, and another, illustrated below, turned up in the vicinity of Bradshaw Lane. (This one’s currently on display in the Fylde Country Life Museum, unless Oliver the sheep’s eaten it by now.)


It probably goes without saying, although I’m going to say it anyhow, the holes in the centre of these perforated stones would have originally accommodated their handles.
More hammers have been discovered at Greengate Farm, Bonds Farm, Birks Farm, Eagland Hill Farm, Hardman’s Wood, the Bowers and, in 1959, two were uncovered simultaneously at Eskham House Farm. I can only assume that Pilling was an extremely noisy place to live back then as well.
In the last part of this article (still sounds impressive) we also mentioned adzes, which, sometimes, were used to create boats. (There is a segue here.) At Well House Farm in 1926 an ancient canoe (told you) was uncovered whilst the farmer was digging a well. True to form the remains have now been lost despite the best efforts, in 1951, of the Pilling Historical Society who re-excavated the area but only uncovered a few scattered fragments of wood.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Canoes, in Pilling?
Yes, well these weren’t the white water rapid variety. They would have been used mainly for just getting around and/or trading locally. Don’t forget that, back in those days, Pilling was mainly swamp and forest, with plenty of streams meandering through it.
Several other Neolithic canoes have been uncovered around Lancashire such as those at Marton Mere (which were actually coracles, but nobody’s reading this any more so who cares?) and Preston Dock. The Preston dock canoe is in the Harris Museum if you want to take a look.
The other way to cross a Neolithic swamp, of course, was by wooden causeway.
Here’s what William Thornber wrote about the ‘Kate’s Pad’ in 1837:

“It is called Kate’s Pad from a tradition of the country people that two maiden ladies of that name constructed it to gratify an inveterate love of snuff which could not be obtained from any nearer mart than the county town.”

The tradition was wrong. Kate’s Pad was crossed in several places by the trunks of ancient trees placing it firmly prehistoric times.
In 1950 an excavation was carried out at Moss Cottage Farm and seventy yards of the track were traced.
The section illustrated below is on display at the Fylde Country Life Museum (upstairs on the balcony in the main section…in the Pilling Historic Society bit).


Kate’s Pad consisted of oak trees up to seventeen feet in length, split into three and laid on rushes. Some of the boards/planks (such as the one above) had large holes bored into one end suggesting that they might have been recycled from previous constructions, although a far more likely explanation would be that the holes were used to attach ropes to so that the planks could be dragged across ground.
Whatever the case, in the 1970s another section of the track was discovered at North Woods Hill Farm and in 1979 a further section unearthed at Eagland Hill. More wooden track ways were also discovered at Ashtons Farm in the 1930s and Chathill Farm in the 1950s.
Now…we were supposed to be talking about hammers in this section, weren’t we? Somewhere along the lines I appear to have been distracted. (What else is new?) So, hammers then – take a look at this:


Now, that might not look like much (because, as we’ve already explained, illustrations and photographs just do don’t do this sort of stuff any justice) but that’s a hammer that is.
Or, at any rate, it’s some sort of pounding device.
It was unearthed at Nateby and was probably used in the construction of the Nateby pile settlement (or whatever it was). What you can’t see in the picture are the carefully hollowed out indentations, the exact size and shape to accommodate a person’s fingers in order to maintain a sturdy grip on the object.
It’s now on display in the Fylde Country Life Museum…worth checking out I reckon.
At which point I’m suddenly going to stop this article for no particular reason other than I’ve run out of steam.

Axes and Hammers -- Pilling’s Prehistoric Legacy: Part One

Pilling’s a good place for ancient history. There’s a lot of it about, lurking under the sods, being trampled by sheep and courting couples, tucked into the corners of meandering dykes (please avoid the obvious comments, will you, and remember that this is still officially a family site).
Fortunately, you see, back in the day, a certain gentleman called Sobee produced a book all about the history of Pilling, and it somehow managed to catch the imagination of the local farmers.
We’ve tried to do the same with the rest of the Fylde and Wyre, but I suspect we’ve failed miserably.
As a result of Sobee’s scribbling, however, farmers around Pilling nowadays tend to pay a lot more attention to the stuff their ploughing up than other local landowners.
And what stuff would that be? Well take a look at this lot.


Somewhere between Cogie Hill and Black Lane Head the ancient stone axe illustrated above (measuring nine and a half inches in length for those who need to know such measurements) was discovered alongside the adze illustrated below.


Incidentally, in case you’re wondering why once again we’ve opted for illustrations rather than photographs, there are a couple of good reasons.
Firstly, our camera is naff and only produces blurred shots of anything less than three feet in height.
Secondly, we’re recycling this lot from our ‘History of the Wyre’ book. (We’re very environmentally conscious.)
Anyhow, getting back to that axe at the top of the article, it was made from partly polished igneous rock originating, like the adze, in the Cumbria (although, of course, there were no county boundaries back when the tools were first fashioned).
What do you mean, what’s an adze? That’s an adze in the illustration, what does it look like?
Okay, adzes were used to hollow out boats and turn soil and stuff. The Cogie Hill adze was made from volcanic tuff, a form of pumice, originating, as we’ve already sort of hinted, at Langdale Pike in Cumbria. Langdale was apparently an important centre for quarrying stone at the time (that being the Neolithic period, of course).
Just to fill the reader in on the details a bit more, a pole would have been stuffed through the hole in the middle of the adze and fastened in place with some sort of rope. Its operator would then stand astride a felled trunk with the stone head pointing towards the ground. Then he’d swing his tool back and forth (watch it…there will be people banned from this board if I find anything offensive in those comments boxes) using the handle for leverage.
Here’s another axe (illustrated below) that was discovered at Bone Hill in 1940.


In case you’re thinking, “How do they know that’s an axe? It looks like any other lump of rock to me,” the truth is, you have to see these things to appreciate them.
Illustrations, even photographs, don’t do the napping and the fine chiselled edges any justice. If you want my advice, you should get in touch with a museum that houses such artefacts and get a private viewing. These ancient implements need to groped and fondled to be fully understood. (I’m warning you lot. We’ve had enough lewd comments around here of late and I know the sort of filthy minds you’ve got.)
Okay, it’s a small, possibly Neolithic, possibly Bronze Age, hand-held axe although, to the best of my knowledge, it’s never been properly dated. The last time we looked it was being kept in a drawer in some deep, dark dungeon beneath the Harris Museum. So now you know who to pester if fancy a grope.
Two more axes were unearthed at Bradshaw Lane Farm. Here’s one of them, six inches in length (seriously…there will be excommunications if you’re not careful) and made from dark, hard mudstone. (Go and look it up if you don’t know what it is.)


And here’s the second, again Neolithic, only this time made of flint.


The nearest flint, it’s worth mentioning, would have been in North Wales suggesting, once again, that trading routes were established by this period. You want more? Of course you do, you’re gagging for it. However you’re going to have to wait until part two because I want my dinner.

A Selection of Fieldnames from Thornton: Part Two

We mentioned in the last section of this article that the ‘Old Earth’ fields denoted the northern most boundaries of the Saxon township of Bourne and, of course, if you check our tithe map again you’ll see that this is obviously the case. We’ve highlighted them in red on the detail below to save you the trouble of having to search for them.


You’ll notice that just above them (as the directionally challenged crow flies) is a mediaeval field called Green Dicks Hey. Don’t ask, because we don’t know, and as much as we’d like to believe that the name alludes to a farmer suffering from a medical complaint, there’s also a Dicks Mill in Carleton, so it was probably just some local play on words. (Come to think of it, Dicks might actually be the local pronunciation of dykes.) Whatever the case, originally no doubt the Old Earth fields would have reached into this area as well. During the mediaeval period a lot of the Saxon tenement field boundaries were removed to open the fields into the shapes we’d more commonly recognise nowadays.
Next to the Old Earth fields, highlighted in yellow (we’ve thought of everything to make your lives easier) is Borty Berry and Bottom Burty Berry. (Go on…get it out of your systems. It sounds a bit like bottom burpy berry, we know. There…better now?)
According to one book on Lancashire fieldnames that we own, the title of which I’ve currently forgotten, which is perhaps as well under the circumstances, ‘Bortyberry’ refers to a field that once had a berry from a bor tree in it.
Yes, well, I can see that, can’t you? Imagine the scene, a wild and woolly night in a Thornton farmhouse, the farmer tamping tobacco into his pipe bowl in front of a roaring log fire whilst his stuffed toy of a son watches the smoke curl up the chimney.

“Jus’ gone darn tha Bortee Burri field, will ’as Our Granville? Av left me flat cap ont’ geetpost.”
“Which one’s Bortee Burri, Da?”
“As one at as un berry roight int’ middle onnit.”
“An berry, Da?”
“Aye…jus’ twon. Right slap bang int middle. An burri, an’ this is vera importuant d’y’ear…” He leans closer and indicates the severity of the case by poking his idiot son in the ribs with his pipe. “An burri from as bor tree.”
“Warts a bor tree, Da?”
“Dunno son. It’s sommat what arv just meed oop. An’ mind y’ don’t get yon field mixed oop with Burtee Burri neither.”
“Burtee Burri, Da?”
“S’reet son. Thart’s t’won next do-oor. T’won wi’ a burri in t’ middle onnit, wat comes from a ‘bur’ tree.”
“You mean, like t’other one further oop, Da, wi’ berry int middle onnit wat comes from a ‘bar’ tree?”
“Thart’s t’one, son. Nay booger off before ye get t’toe o’me clog wedg’d oop tarse.”

All right…you get the point. The Lancashire fieldnames book has almost certainly got this one wrong.
By our reckoning (which is what really counts) the ‘berry’ in ‘borty berry, burty berry and barty berry’ refers to a burg. (That’s an ancient enclosed – more often than not fortified – settlement.) Take that other Lancashire Bury, for example. We all know that was originally a burg and not just a small round edible object much sought after by hungry birds.
As for the ‘bor’, ‘bur’ and ‘bar’, clearly they all stem from the same local dialect root ‘bur’, recorded by Thornber as meaning the ‘edge or rim’ of something. I remember when I were nobbut a kid my grandmother warning me when opening a can (this was back in the days when tin openers were none-electronic, dangerously sharp and pointed objects) not to cut myself on the ‘bur’ (that being the jagged strip of metal around the lid).
Therefore all these fields denote the edge of the burg, which makes perfect sense when you come to look at how they relate to the Saxon tenement fields.
So that’d be the burg of Brun then, or to put it another way, Brun Burgh.
Don’t even get me started. I realise nobody wants to believe that Brunanburgh ever took place in Thornton, despite the ancient legend that a huge Norse battle once covered Bourne Hill, so I won’t even go there. Let’s move on…


Right, we’ve coloured in/highlighted a couple more fields for you. In red on the right hand side is Grapy Field. We figured that a name like that would obviously mean something, and, after a huge amount of research (almost three and a half minutes spent on Google) we discovered that Grapy is an Old English/ French word (so that’d be around the Saxon/Norman period then) meaning…er…grape-like. As in, “This tastes rather grapy.”
Exactly what that’s got to do with the field in question I honestly couldn’t say.
The other field highlighted above (in yellow) is Biggins Field. We’re on much safer ground here. Biggins is a Norse word referring to a new house (and not a jolly rotund gay bloke who used to be in Porridge), all of which suggests that between one and one and half thousand years ago some Norse geezer constructed his abode smack bang in the middle of this field.
Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, Biggins Field is nowadays underneath the Wolsey Close, Ingleway, Hampton Place area off Cumberland Avenue, so if you happen to live in one of those closes it might be worth checking your flowerbeds carefully, because you never know what might be in there. Even better, give Wyre Archaeology a bell and we’ll take a gander for you.


Right, a couple more then -- the first being Garlick’s Hey, as highlighted above in blue. Please note the spelling. It’d be easy to assume that this field just south of Hillylaid crossing on Lawson’s Road was where garlic was once grown. Such an assumption would, however, be incorrect. Terry Pratchett knew what he was doing when he named one of his Lancre witches Magrat Garlick, Magrat because her mother couldn’t spell, and Garlick because Garlick is actually a Lancashire dialect word (now mostly fallen out of use, I suspect) meaning ‘Simpleton’.
Then there’s Tinkler’s Hey, which we’ve highlighted in yellow. We’ve no real suggestions for this one except, perhaps, that it’s either a mispronunciation of ‘Tinker’s Hey’ or that it was just one of those fields that was used as a convenience. (Boom boom!)
Lastly (although there are plenty of other fieldnames worth mentioning on this map, such as Mill Hey on the corner of Crabtree Road, which is nowhere near Marsh Mill and therefore suggests that a more ancient mill, no documents for which survive, once stood in the vicinity, but we’re not going to because this article’s gone on way too long as it is) there’s Castle Field, otherwise known as Castle Hill, highlighted below.


To the best of our knowledge no castle has ever stood on, near, or in the vicinity of Castle Hill/Field, which means only thing. Castles were the Saxons’ way of describing ancient fortified earthworks – ancient and ruinous in Saxon times I should point out -- so the chances are, some prehistoric (possibly Roman) settlement once stood here. Not that we’re ever likely to find out now because somebody went and built the ICI right on top of it.
Enough…I’m all field-named out. Time for a change of tack with the next posting I reckon.

Chipping away at History

“The village of Chipping is an obscure and uninteresting place, on the west bank of a rivulet, which divides it from the estate of Leagram Hall, at the foot of the lofty and black elevation of Parlike Pike.”

Baines’ ‘History of Lancashire’

The residents of Chipping might well deservedly take offence at the ‘uninteresting’ adjective ascribed to their picturesque and history-bloated village there. Chipping’s actually a fascinating place. So much so, in fact, there’s a house for sale in the middle of it that we wouldn’t mind owning ourselves. (Of course we’d have to sell a lot more books first, several million of them probably, but what the heck, we’re allowed to dream aren’t we?)
Here’s a photograph of our (potential) future cottage for you:


We like Chipping a lot, and Baines committed a massive injustice with his somewhat too succinct appraisal of the place.
There’s history aplenty in this tiny corner of the Wyre, as John Weld (Chipping’s most prominent Victorian antiquarian) discovered when he wrote his book ‘Weapons and Implements. Prehistoric and Ancient Races. Volume Two’. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, it was never published (possibly because of it’s rather unappealing title – something like ‘Death and Slaughter in the Fylde’ might have worked better for the publishers), but we were lucky enough to be shown the original when we visited the Harris Museum a couple of years ago. (And before anyone runs off to complain about us illegally tramping through the vaults of the Harris Museum, we were invited -- officially and legally -- so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.)
There’s reckoned to be barrows, ancient and mysterious, in the fields behind St Bartholomew’s according to John Dixon and Jaana Jarvinen’s ‘Historic Walks Around Bleasdale’. Or, at any rate, you have to ‘…follow the hollow-way on, passing mounds, to go over the stile in the fence.’ So we’re assuming they’re barrows of some description. Whatever the case, we couldn’t see them from the churchyard anyway, as the photograph below demonstrates.


And there’s a yew tree, old and massive, said to have been standing (with a little help from some much needed supports in recent times) for at least seven centuries. Baines might not have found that interesting, but we did. That’s why we took a photograph of it.


It’s an ugly old sod, but so would you be if you’d been lurking there, come rain, snow or shine, since the early mediaeval period with only the occasional courting couple or the odd stray dog emptying its bladder against you for company.
There are lots of ghosts in Chipping, too. One of our favourite stories concerns a barmaid from the Sun Inn. Her name was Lizzy Dean. One morning Our Lizzy looked out of her window at the sound of the church bells pealing, only to discover her fiancé emerging from St Bartholomew’s porch married to another girl. In her anguish she hanged herself, requesting in her suicide note that she be buried beneath the church path, so that her ex-fiancé would be forced to walk over her corpse every Sunday. (There’s nothing like a woman scorned, eh?) The vicar, apparently, thought better of her suggestion, and had her interred in one corner of the graveyard instead…which, to be honest, casts some suspicions over the authenticity of this tale. Suicide was considered an unholy act by the church and people who took their own lives were generally laid to rest – or ‘unrest’ as the case might be – in unconsecrated ground. But this is a ghost story, so we won’t let minor quibbles get in the way of telling it.
Because her last request was never granted, her spirit still haunts the Sun Inn to this day…allegedly.
Want to see a photograph of the melancholy spot? We thought you might, which was why we took one.


There it is, as seen from the church steps where Lizzy first saw her bridegroom metamorphose into a sod. If you look closely enough, you might just be able to see a pale, female face at the window.
That’d be Michelle consuming her second pint and a meat and tatty pie.
Enough! No doubt we’ll have more to tell you about Chipping at some point, but for now it’s time for breakfast.

Joining the Dots…

It’s time for another one of those articles that was originally written for the Wyre Archaeology newsletter many hundreds of years ago (which explains why the illustrations are all greyscale and extremely low quality, because I had to scan them in from the original), reused in the Wyre Archaeology Omnibus (which has long since been out of print, and quite rightly so), churned up again for the first of the Fylde and Wyre Antiquarian books, and is now being dragged kicking and screaming from its coffin once more for use on this website, simply because we’re great believers in recycling.

(It's amazing what rubbish we get away.)

This article should also, by rights, have appeared on this board about twelve months ago, but for some reason or other I never got around to actually posting it. However, there’s a half-finished Nintendo game downstairs that I’d like to get on with so I thought it was about time to ressurect it.
Anyhow…according to the book ‘Heroes of the Dawn’ published by Time-Life: “…the 6th century pendant brooch (illustrated below) from a tomb at Hallstaff, Austria, bears circular emblems thought to be symbols of the sun.”
These geometric shapes are believed to date from between 800 to 500 BC, an era otherwise known as the Hallstaff period.


Interestingly, as far as Wyre Archaeology is concerned, the symbols on the Bleasdale urns are remarkably similar and have been dated to the Bronze Age; roughly 2,500 BC to 900 BC…approximately 100 to 2,400 years earlier than those on the pendant. Dots, cross-hatched triangles, wavy lines…they’re all there if you look closely enough.


So exactly how old are the urns and what do the images mean?
Well, the ‘three concentric circles’ formations crop up frequently in the British archaeological landscape, cup and ring marks adorning rocks in Yorkshire, circular steps beneath Saxon crosses, ring designs scratched into Beaker pottery…even the shape of Bleasdale Circle itself with its outer palisade, its inner henge and its circular ditch could all be said to be following the same pattern.
It’s been suggested that the rings represent the sun, the earth and the moon in alignment. It might even be possible that they’re a primitive attempt at drawing a tunnel.
Then there are the wavy lines…presumably a stylised version of the ocean across which, we’re informed, our ancestors had to travel in death to reach the afterlife.
And the triangles…do they represent mountains such as Fairsnape?


Early pieces of rock art appear to have evolved over time from recognisable images into more abstract designs. Take the frequently occurring icon illustrated above, for example, which seems to show a druidical figure worshiping the sun. Or possibly an early attempt at parachuting. Maybe even somebody carrying an extremely large lollipop.
Is it possible that this simple character evolved into the more complex design shown in the photograph below, which bears a striking resemblance to our concentric circles?


This in turn might have evolved into the well-known labyrinths, an example of which is illustrated below.


Naturally pre-historians and archaeologists alike have been keen to give religious significance to any design beyond their immediate interpretation. They do this sort of thing. I've never worked out why. In future generations museums'll have Barbie Dolls and egg cups all lined up on a shelf labelled 'Religious Fetishes', I can see it coming.
Countless ancient images scrawled into cave walls showing erect phalluses have been automatically interpreted as fertility symbols, created in worship of sexually voracious gods closely associated with the great cycle of life and death.

Yes…well…perhaps this sort of imaginative conclusion shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Wander into any bus shelter in the Fylde and Wyre and you’ll be confronted with similar crude drawings, usually bearing the name of some local teenager who’s developing a reputation for his/herself. We can state here, for the record, that none of the latter were drawn in adulation of a higher being.

In fact the idea that our Bronze Age ancestors were scrawling these exaggerated doodles for religious reasons is probably just a phallusy. (Yes…we know that was dreadful, but we don’t make any money out of this so there’s no point in trying to get us the sack.)
To return to the point behind this article, what exactly do the markings on the Bleasdale urns represent?
Well, all matters considered, they were probably just etched into the clay rims because they looked nice. Unless, of course, you know different…

Incidentally, on a slightly different track, nobody's signed the guestbook for this place since last June, and the last entry is linked to a website that's been dead for at least six months. It's got one more week to buck up its ideas, and if nobody's added to it by then, it'll be taken blindfolded round the back of the site and shot.

Being An Shorte History of Ye Olde Village of Layton

Nowadays Layton has become embroiled in the sprawling blot that constitutes Blackpool, but originally it was a village in its own right, long before the latter town was even a twinkle in the tourist department’s eye. In fact, Layton was first recorded in the Domesday Book (William the Bastard’s great personal accounts ledger of 1085) as Laton, a Saxon name (of course), the ‘ton’ being a ‘village’ or ‘enclosure’ and the ‘La’…ah, well, now, therein lies the problem, because, as always, such matters are open to interpretation. Unfortunately, however, according to our own Saxon dictionary, the only source for this prefix appears to stem from the word ‘Laeth’, meaning ‘hostile, loathsome and/or evil.’
That’s not a pleasant way to describe Layton -- accurate, perhaps, but not very pleasant. Alan Stott, the late respected local historian, records in his ‘Layton Village: A brief history of the manor’ that the name translates as the ‘enclosure by the water’. We’re not entirely sure how he reached that conclusion, so we’ll stick with our version for now, and even use William Thornber’s description of the place back in Victorian times in a feeble attempt to justify our cause: “The village of Layton, with the exception of Layton Hall and a lodge, the residence of Mr Thomas Fisher, is composed of very mean houses.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Layton might be a Saxon name, but there are older tales to be had here. Such as this one, where, according to Reverend Bulpit’s ‘Notes on the Fylde’: “Mr. Wray, at (Hoo Hill) Cemetery, has a remarkable stone hammer which formed part of a path below the surface level.”
We’ve mentioned this ‘stone hammer’ (and the prehistoric track on which it was found) before, but because it’s a good one we’re going to mention it again. Nowadays the hammer, illustrated below, is kept in a storeroom at the Grundy Art Gallery. At least, it was a year or so ago. It might have been moved by now.


Recognise it? Probably not, but let’s return to Bulpit for a more detailed description: “A hole has been worked through the stone for the insertion of a handle. The drilling of this hole would be a work of much labour. It could be accomplished by the use of flints, and I have some ancient tools (known as such by their gloss) such as would accomplish the works. They were found at a brickfield near the sports ground, worked by Councillor Fenton.”
There’s another ancient find connected with Layton, which we’ve probably also mentioned before…although I can’t be certain, so just bear with us.
The quern, illustrated below (don’t worry…we’ll be getting onto some proper photographs shortly…it’s just that my camera is a bit rubbish when it comes to taking images of anything smaller than an elephant) is currently on display at the Grundy Art Gallery (unlike the stone hammer above, which you can only gain access to if you have the right connections).Or then again, it might not be on display. It was about a year and a half back, which was the last time we saw it.


Actually, that’s just the top half. Nobody knows where the bottom half is…and just in case you’re wondering, a quern was a device used to grind grain. A wooden handle, fitted into the hole at the side, would have acted as a lever. The grain was poured in through the hole in the top, making the rotary quern the blender of its day. (See…it’s all educational stuff, is this.)
This particular quern was discovered during the construction of some annex or other at Victoria hospital, which, of course, is just on the outskirts of Layton village.
Enough of the prehistoric stuff though. Let’s get back to Layton’s Saxon roots.
Unlike Marton (which we’ve also written about in the past, so if you’re really that interested you can go and look it up) there are no ‘strip’ or ‘tenement’ fields on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps to help us pin down the village’s location. That’s because, during the mediaeval period, many Saxon strip field boundaries were removed to make way for larger mediaeval fields.
The layout of the buildings around Layton Road, however, and the fact that the road itself is lower than the houses surrounding it (Saxon road systems, like those of the Celts, typically being sunken) suggest that the area in the photograph below was once the centre of the village


No…look closely. The garden’s about three feet higher than the pavement. That’s because the road is sunken. See…we’re not just making this up to sound impressive.
That’s a cobble built cottage. (It’s a bit hard to tell what with the resolution being so low, but it’s actually constructed from pebbles off the seashore) and it’s end on to the road. That’s typical of Saxon longhouses, that is. We’re not saying that it is a Saxon longhouse. But it’s probably rebuilt on the same plot using reclaimed materials.
Somewhat uniquely for Fylde and Wyre villages, we can even tell you (in a roundabout manner) who the original Saxon chieftain was. We’ve mentioned this before somewhere, but to save you the trouble of having to go back and dig it out, here it is again (we’re too considerate for you lot, we really are):

“In 1292 Sir William Botiler laid claim to Layton rabbit warren, and during the court case successfully proved that ‘fairs, assizes, markets and salvage’ around the village had been: “…the hereditary rights of his ancestors from the accession of William the Conqueror.” Botiler, however, wasn’t Sir William’s ancestral name. Over a century earlier, the family surname had been changed from the somewhat more Saxon sounding Walter, because Theobald Walter at the time was the personal butler (or ‘botlier’) to Prince John. The name Walter means the ‘ruler of an army’ as derived from the Germanic elements for ‘rule’ (being ‘wald’) and ‘army’ (being ‘heri’). All of which suggests that, at the time of the Norman invasion, Sir William Botiler’s ancestor was the Saxon chieftain at Layton.”

Anyhow, the reason behind William Botiller wanting to prove his right to assizes and stuff in the first place was because in 1257 Henry III granted him an annual fair (from the 29th of November to the 1st of December) and a weekly market (held on Wednesdays) in Layton.
The fair, no doubt, was held on the village green in the shadow of the village cross, both of which nowadays, true to form, are long since gone.
Nil desperandum ancient market spotters; we’ve got a good idea where they originally were.


As far as we can work out, that building in the photograph above is Cross House, and it’s called Cross House because that’s where the village cross used to stand. And we know from our researches that the village green stood across the road from Cross House and, therefore, the village cross. So, if you happen to live in the house directly opposite the one in the photograph, it might be a good idea to take a mattock and a metal detector to your lawn, because who knows what those mediaeval peasants might have dropped on market day?
Layton market, as far as we can tell, was the earliest one granted (at least officially) in the Fylde.
Now then, according to the title of this article, this is meant to be a short history of Layton village. Unfortunately we’ve barely scratched the surface here, so ‘short’ is an inadequate description really. However, I’ve no doubt that, natural disasters and other distractions permitting, at some point in the future we’ll come back to the subject for another, possibly deeper, delve around

The Really, Really Early History of Blackpool

Time for a spot of Geological Temporal Travel. Let’s turn back the clocks to the Ice Age when the north polar ice cap was considerably larger than it is today, extending right across Britain as far as the Bristol Channel.
Blackpool at this point (in fact the whole of the Fylde and Wyre, but it’s Blackpool we’re dealing with in this posting, so we’d better not get carried away) was, unsurprisingly, covered by a thick layer of ice, the gradual movement of which dragged rocks of all shapes and sizes along beneath its weight, flattening them out and depositing them randomly across the district in the form of boulder clays.
One glacier flowed from the Mountains of Mourne towards Snowdon, churning up the seabed along the Blackpool coast. According to E. W. Binney’s ‘Notes on the Drift Deposits found near Blackpool’: “The rocks in the till (that’s the gravel dredged from the ocean floor) have, no doubt, come from a considerable distance, especially the lias and chalk specimens, which are not now found in situ nearer the north-east coast of Ireland.”
Leaving the double negatives aside, other glaciers passed over Cumbria, all of them eventually coalescing across Morecambe Bay and forming the cliffs around Blackpool. Recognisable rocks still in existence today, such as Carlin and Redbank (both conglomerates), were compacted into solid boulders.
Because of all the movement amongst the various strata, from time to time unusual formations would occur.
William Thornber’s ‘History of Blackpool’ records that the cliffs around Bispham once produced huge, personality-filled rocks: “…like stalactites and icicles, with their points towards the centre, crowned generally with one or more large ‘cobble’ stones.”
Unfortunately, the unstable layers of sand that had formed around these ‘stalactites’ undermined the cliffs themselves and, over time, coupled with the constant erosion of the tide, these rocks plummeted into the sea.
The sole survivor (as far as we know) was actually donated to William Thornber during his tenancy as the reverend of St. John’s in Blackpool, (this was before he was defrocked from womanising, drinking excessively and punching various members of his congregation repeatedly in the gob) in recognition of his geological research.


To this day it stands outside the church opposite the Winter Gardens acting as the sundial illustrated above. (And before anybody asks, we’ve lost the original photograph and can’t be bothered catching the tram into Blackpool to retake it. If you don’t believe the rock’s there, go and have a look for yourselves.) The gnomon, predictably, is also missing, so if you’ve ever wondered what this phallic shaped geological phenomenon was up to, now you know.
Another ‘stalactite’ rescued from the cliffs once stood at Norbreck Villa.
It’s recorded as an ‘erratic’ or ‘whorled boulder’ in ‘Bispham in Times Past’ by Catherine Rothwell in the following manner: “(It) was retained in the grounds of Norbreck Villa by James Shorrocks when he created Norbreck Hall Hydro by adding an extra storey to the Villa.”
To the best of our knowledge, pretty much like the other rock outside St. John’s, the sundial it became no longer exists, the illustration below having been based on an old photograph. (This time we drew it up because we weren’t entirely sure how the copyright stands.)


Are you enjoying this so far? Good…because it doesn’t improve.
The Ice Age also had its fauna, of course. The ice sheets that formed across the ocean created colossal bridges from mainland Europe, allowing deer, elks and other such migratory species to enter Britain with relative ease. And in pursuit of their prey, came human hunters, little realising that the ice would shortly melt and leave them stranded. All of which brings us to the slightly more interesting part of this history lesson, that being the start of Blackpool’s human occupation.
Time for another quote, courtesy of Reverend Bulpit’s ‘Notes on the Fylde’ published in 1879: “The Jolly family interested themselves from 1731 to 1781 widening and deepening the outlet from Marton Mere, and so got rid of a great amount of the water. During the drainage large quantities of oak and yew trees were found embedded in the soil.”
The moss stocks were prehistoric, as proven by the fact that they were buried beneath the peat. Even more interesting is the fact that, apparently, they’d all been deliberately felled.
Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, none of the Marton moss stocks now survive. Elsewhere around the district, however, similar stumps (such as those in Pilling) have been discovered beneath the peat and have been dendro-dated to 3,000 B.C.
Even the relatively small patch of ground now occupied by the Pembroke Hotel (formerly the site of the Pembroke Gardens and Derby Baths) has produced moss stocks in its time, being once the site of a diminutive self-contained swamp.
Here’s what E. W. Binney had to say about it: “These beds have evidently been formed in small swamps, by obstruction to the natural drainage. The most remarkable of them is that seen a little south of the Gynn, where a bed of peat is about 4 feet in thickness. In it are some hazel nuts, besides oak, birch, hazel, alder, and willow trees.”
All of the species mentioned by Binney are native British trees. Presumably ‘torf delvers’ (the local name for the farmers who made their living digging and drying turf) excavated the peat back in the days when such activities were still perfectly legal, explaining why the Pembroke Hotel, along with its car park, now sits in a hollow as can be seen in the photograph below.


In addition to marshes, swamps and forests there were also a number of rivers and streams around Blackpool, some of which survived until comparatively recent times. Take for example the watercourse that once ran through Bispham, parallel to All Hallows Road.
Kathleen Eyre in ‘Seven Golden Miles’ recalls that: “At times such was the flow that one resident remembers people rowing past the cottages in boats and children being ferried part-way to the Sunday School by the same means.”
This river is now gone but originally ran past Bridge End House on All Saints Road. There are no prizes for guessing where that particular building derived its name. Bridge End House has now also gone.
From here the stream continued northwards past an area near Horseman’s Hill known as Hayholme (later Higham), ‘holme’ being a Norse word referring to a bend in a river, through Anchorsholme (where, once again, its course, presumably, meandered) and on towards St. Andrews on Rossall Road, which stands on the grounds that once constituted Ritherholme, the original name for Cleveleys.
Here again the ‘holme’ indicates that the stream became serpentine. The ‘Rither’ part of ‘Ritherholme’ meant simply ‘river’, Saxons not being particularly inventive when it came to proper nouns.
Another large watercourse now long since built over was Spen Dyke, which started out life as both a small brook originating on Marton Moss, and an outlet from Marton Mere.
These brooks, apparently, met at Spen Corner on Waterloo Road before heading northwest, forming a large black pool, and then emptying into the sea near Manchester Square.
This is what Thornber had to say about it: “Blackpool obtained its name, as many other towns and hamlets…from its ancient site being on the banks of an old pool, the waters of which were a dark, black colour. This pool is recorded, in the old surveys of the townships, as having been one half mile in breadth.”
Interestingly, the word ‘pool’ is local dialect for a stream or river and might even have been referring to Spen Dyke itself.
‘Spen’ itself is another old dialect word referring to ‘Mother’s milk’, indicating, perhaps, that throughout history the Blackpool locals have had a sarcastic sense of humour.
Architectus, a nineteenth century local historian (whose real name was James Singleton) described Spen Dyke in the following manner: “I was always fascinated as a boy with the Spen Dyke, a rather wide and deep dirty stream, which commenced somewhere on the moss, away towards Lytham, and eventually emptied itself through a very large pipe into the sea near the Manchester Hotel. It was later on covered over by a huge brick culvert but not before it became famous as a landmark and a musical hall joke.”
Is anybody still reading this? I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t…it is going on a bit. Don’t worry, we’re slowly but surely getting there…wherever there is.
In case you’re wondering what could possibly be amusing about Spen Dyke, the truth is that householders living along its banks, before the age of sewers and public health officials, would empty their waste directly into it.
Architectus includes the following song in his book that he once heard sung at an Opera House pantomime: “We won’t go to sea any more, But we’ll stay by the Spen Dyke shore, Where its perfume has grown, Like eau-de-cologne, So we won’t go to sea any more.”
Legend has it that, should Spen Dyke ever flood it would spell the end for Blackpool (possibly courtesy of the raw sewerage and associated medical complaints) so it’s perhaps as well that nowadays it’s underground.
Another river seems to have once emptied into the Irish Sea further north at Church Street.


The illustration above is based on a photograph taken circa 1864. It shows a wooden structure known as the ‘Bridge of Peace’ crossing a natural gully in the cliff face, no doubt cut by the flow of the brook in times long past.
This particular gully was known, before it was filled in, as ‘Lane Ends Ginn’, which brings us to the Gynn itself where, in prehistoric times, yet another sizable watercourse cut its way through the landscape.
Exactly how many streams, brooks and rivers once meandered through Blackpool isn’t known, but we’re sure that we’ve now reduced our readership to absolute zero, so perhaps it time we brought this posting to abrupt end.

Wake up and Smell the Rushes: Part One

Everybody’s heard of the Wakes Weeks, right? Okay, everybody who lives in Lancashire has heard of the Wakes Weeks, right? What? All right…everybody who lives in Lancashire and has ever read a book has, probably, heard of the Wakes Weeks somewhere down the line, yes?
However, how many people realise that the origins of these drunken, hedonistic orgies are firmly rooted in religious festivities?
Hard to believe, we know, but this is what happens when puritanical do-gooders impose their doctrines on the over worked, underpaid classes and expect them to behave. (Ahem…excuse me…that’s what’s known as a socialist burp.)
Let’s go back to the beginning.

A couple of thousand years ago, the mainly agricultural residents of the Fylde and Wyre (not to mention the rest of the Lancashire) would set aside certain days every year from growing their cabbages to celebrate, grovel to and demand of the pagan gods certain favours in return for all their hard work, such as a good harvest or a pox on the head of their next door neighbour who wouldn’t shift her dung cart.

These festivities usually involved a good old-fashioned knees-up, plenty of drunken debauchery and the exercising of fertility rites, much like the modern Blackpool holidaymakers expect from their excursions today.

Then Christianity happened.
The pagan gods, originally accepted by the new Christian doctrine, soon became frowned upon and eventually regarded as something to be stamped out at all costs.
Pagan festivals became replaced by Saints days, each local church having its own particular saint and, therefore, its own particular day.
From such ‘holy days’ sprang the modern word ‘holidays’, proving if nothing else that you can take the religion out of paganism, but you can't take the paganism out of religion.
During the summer these holy days were known as wakes, the name being derived from having to staying awake the entire night beforehand in prayer. Of course, with that sort of sanctimonious ‘not-exactly-a-party-is-it?’ attitude, the Christian church found it almost impossible to stamp out some of the older customs entirely.
Rush bearing, for example, had originally been a pagan fertility rite, similar to the May Day custom of sticking boughs down people’s chimneys.
You’ve never heard of that custom? Okay, here’s William Thornber describing the events of May Day in Poulton several centuries ago: “On the morning of the first of that month many a May-bough ornamented the village and town, inserted by some unlucky youngsters, at the risk of life or limb, into the chimnies (sic) of their neighbours’ houses.”
Each bough was, apparently, different, depending on the nature of the woman who lived there. Elder represented a scold, ash symbolised somebody who swore a lot, and nettles, thistles, and sloes basically meant you couldn’t stand the sight of the nasty old bag.
Anyhow, rush bearing, as we were saying before being diverted, had similar origins, although it wasn’t without its practical uses as far as the church authorities were concerned. Because floorboards were expensive, rushes were used, allegedly, to keep the floors from being churned up. Unfortunately the practice wasn’t very hygienic. Erasmus, an Oxford professor during the reign of Henry the Eighth, informs us that: “The floors are commonly of clay strewed with rushes; under which lies unmolested an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle and everything that is nasty.”
Add to that the fact that the aristocracy had a habit of taking their dogs into church with them and, to put it simply, the whole building must have stunk to high heaven.
So the ancient pagan custom of rush bearing was kept alive as a way of renewing the stinking mounds of pulped green slush that constituted church floors.
Unfortunately for the clergy, if the rush bearing ceremony was to be conducted properly (as far as the much-oppressed congregation saw it at any rate) then the whole pagan kit and caboodle needed to accompany the occasion.
On the morning of ‘rush bearing’ day, the maidens of the village (and by maidens, we really do mean ‘maidens’) would disappear into the local woods to gather the rushes for the upcoming events. Always remembering that this was originally a fertility custom, it’s hardly surprising that not all of them returned the maidens they set out as. Here’s what one commentator in 1626 said of the activity: “All the recompense I can make those maydes that brought rushes, is to wish them good husbands.”

It might have been Terry Pratchett who once commented that, those who went gathering nuts in May often ended up bearing fruit in August.
Whatever the case, the members of the congregation left standing following the morning’s events went on to “build themselves huts of boughs” and, as Porter informs us in his ‘History of the Fylde’: “The rush cart, decorated with flowers and ribbons, was paraded through the village streets, accompanied by morris-dancers and others bearing flags or banners.

One of the mummers, dressed in a motley suit, somewhat resembling that of a circus jester, jingled a horse-collar hung with bells, and kept up a constant succession of small jokes at the expense of the bystanders.”
(You can almost picture Edward Woodward screaming, “Killing me won’t save your apples” from inside a wicker man here, can’t you?)
At which juncture we’re going to unexpectedly end this section of the article, for no other reason than we felt like a break ourselves. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to come back next week.

The Triumphant Return of Mr. Sobee: Part Two

In the last exciting episode, our intrepid researchers discovered a secret cache of never before published photographs from the Sobee ‘History of Pilling’ collection that, should they ever come to the attention of the public, might spell the end for the Catholic church and the downfall of the British government. Now read on…
The photograph below shows a section of the Kate’s Pad, an ancient wooden track running higardly pigardly across Pilling moss. (Someone’s going to complain about that. Yes, we know it doesn’t really run ‘higardly pigardly’…we just said that to make it sound a bit more interesting.) There’s an extremely similar version of this photograph in ‘The History of Pilling’, but before you start doubting our word that these are ‘never before published’ slides, if you’ve got a copy of the aforementioned book, try comparing the two. Yes…this one’s been taken from an ever-so-very-slightly-different angle, hasn’t it? See…now apologise for calling us liars and we’ll say no more about it.

Several sections of the Kate’s Pad can still be seen in public, incidentally; one at the Fylde Country Life Museum in Fleetwood, one at the Harris Museum in Preston and one at Lancaster Museum in…well…Lancaster, obviously. One of these day’s we’ll get around to writing a proper article all about it for this board…but not right now.
Moving on…next up we have a palstave from Cumming Carr farm. Actually, if I wanted to be pedantic, strictly speaking this isn’t a palstave. It’s an unsocketted, flanged bronze axe head, which is remarkably similar to a palstave in many respects, but to the trained (and probably annoyingly arrogant eye) is as different as butter is to lard.

Again, we seem to recall seeing this Bronze Age implement being shown to us at the Harris Museum, accompanied by the words: “We’re not sure if this is from the Wyre or not. It was just in a box stuffed under the table.”
And finally, for now at any rate (until we can talk David Thompson into copying the rest of these photographs onto a disc for us), a collection of Neolithic polishers found at Crookabreast Farm in 1938. Polishers, basically, were similar to whetting stones, used with water and sand to grind down the faces of other stone tools. One of the polishers in the photograph below was found stuffed into the roots of an oak tree. The rest were scattered on the ground around it. God knows where they’ve got to now. They’re probably in the Preston Museum Repository, crammed beneath a stuffed owl with one glass eye hanging from its head, and labelled with the words: ‘Fossilised Dinosaur Dung from Warrington.’

We couldn’t leave this particular article, however, without including the following photograph. Yes, it has been seen before, because it appears in ‘The History of Pilling’ book itself. It shows some of the founding members of the Pilling Historic Society, excavating the Kate’s Pad at Iron House Farm, Out Rawcliffe. In fact, to be honest, it was probably the photograph being taken by Mr. Sobee on Rawcliffe Moss in the opening photograph of last week’s posting.
At the front of the group is an extremely young looking Headlie Lawrenson (looking a bit like John Mills there), our old archaeologing friend and one of the first members of Wyre Archaeology, who sadly passed away last year. We’re not sure if we’re infringing copyright by posting this one, but frankly we don’t give a stuff.

The Triumphant Return of Mr. Sobee: Part One

Back in 1953 Frederick James Sobee, the headmaster of Pilling Church of England School, wrote a rather excellent book that, should you happen to own an original copy nowadays, is worth a bomb. It was, of course, ‘The History of Pilling’, now re-released by Landy publishing and still costing a bomb, but not quite as much as an original version does.

What a lot of people don’t know is that, along with the dozen or so photographs that Mr. Sobee included in his work, there were dozens…if not hundreds…more that never quite made it to press. These were all taken on large format glass slides (there’s probably a name for them, but I’m buggered if I know what it is) and, by a circuitous course of ancestry into which we’ve never delved (well…Michelle and I live by the archaeologist’s code of: “Don’t ask if they’re not volunteering the information readily…”) ended up in the hands of the late Neil Thompson. No doubt today they belong to David, his son. Whatever the case, Neil and David went to great lengths to scan said slides into their computer and then re-touch the more disfigured amongst them in Photoshop. At some point I’ll have to ask David for a copy of the disc, because there’s some fascinating pictures amongst them and they’re an historic document worth publishing in some manner or other in their own right.
Anyhow, shortly after Neil’s death, we were rummaging…sorry…‘tidying up’…some of the drawers in the Wyre Archaeology office when we came across a few of the above mentioned photographs. Neil had printed them out for an exhibition in Pilling village hall last year. So, naturally, we borrowed them (as I suspect the original slides had been ‘borrowed’ many decades before) so that you (our reader…singular) could have a look for yourself.
All of which preamble brings us to the first of these fascinating titbits, which shows Mr. Sobee himself, complete with camera and tripod, standing in a field in Out Rawcliffe, surveying his domain for whatever reason he had for surveying it.
Our second photograph shows a red deer antler, discovered (as Sobee’s own handwriting explains) at Bradshaw Lane (presumably that’d be the farm and not in the middle of the actual lane itself) at a depth of nine feet. This prehistoric find is mentioned in the book, but the photograph itself doesn’t put in an appearance, so, if you’ve ever lain awake at night worrying about what the ‘Bradshaw Lane red deer antler’ looked like, now you know.
Thirdly we have a Neolithic stone axe discovered at Black Lane Head. A photograph of this axe does appear in ‘The History of Pilling’ but it isn’t this version. The one in the book isn’t held in place by a couple of nails, for a start, and isn’t accompanied by Mr. Sobee’s own calligraphic efforts. Just to add a bit more information here, the axe was found in a field between Cogie Hill and Black Lane Head, measured nine and a half inches in length, and was made from partly polished igneous rock originating in the Lake District. We’re not entirely sure whether it ended up in the Fylde Country Life Museum in Fleetwood, or the Harris Museum in Preston. I’ve got a vague recollection of seeing it in the latter. To be honest, it might be worth our while sending some of these photographs down to the Harris Museum to help them identify the plethora of artefacts they’ve got filling their archive drawers, because, frankly, their cataloguing system is in a right old mess.

Our final photograph for now shows Mr. Sobee’s good use of the classroom blackboard, having presumably glued this handheld axe onto it for maximum effect. There’s little point in detailing the artefact here, because all the information you need to know is included in the photograph, except to say that this one’s definitely in the Harris Museum. We asked them to dig it out for us, and, of course, the museum staff obligingly did so. (Which just goes to show, it’s not what you know, but who you know that counts.)

Right, four photographs is more than enough for one week. If this article is ‘doing it for you’ (whatever ‘it’ might be) then you might be glad to know that we’ve got a few more of these photographs yet and, most likely, we’ll be posting them here next week.