Scan and page transcript from:
LANCASHIRE - Brief Historical and Descriptive Notes
by Leo H. Grindon
Pub. 1892
pages 68-69 |
68 Illustrations of Lancashire It is not in manufacturing Lancashire as in the old-fashioned rural counties, - Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and appled Somerset, - where on every side one is allured by some beautiful memorial of the lang syne. "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village 0f the plain " is not here. Everything, where Cotton reigns, presents the newness of aspect of an Australian colony. The archaeological scraps - such few as there may be - are usually submerged, even in the older towns, in the "full sea " of recent building. Even in the graveyards, the places of all others which in their tombstones and inscriptions unite past and present so tenderly, the imagination has usually to turn away unfed. In place of yew-trees old as York Minster, if there be anything in the way of green monument, it is a soiled and disconsolate shrub from the nearest nursery garden. The situation of these towns is often pleasing enough: sometimes it is picturesque, and even romantic. Having begun in simple homesteads, pitched where comfort and safety seemed best assured, they are often found upon gentle eminences, the crests of which, as at Oldham, they now overlap; others, like Stalybridge, lie in deep hollows, or, like Blackburn, have gradually spread from the margin |
The Cotton District 69 have the ancient character pleasingly commemorated in their names, as Haslingden, the " place of hazel-nuts." The eastern border of the county being characterised by lofty and rocky hills, the localities of the towns and villages are there often really favoured in regard to scenery. This also gives great interest to the approaches, as when, after leaving Todmorden, we move through the sinuous gorge that, bordered by Cliviger, "mother of rocks," leads on to Burnley. The higher grounds are bleak and sterile, but the warmth and fertility of the valleys make amends. In any case, there is never any lack of the beauty which comes of the impregnation of wild nature with the outcome of human intelligence. Manchester itself occupies part of a broad level, usually clay-floored, and with peat-rnosses touching the frontiers. In the bygones nothing was sooner found than standing water the world probably never contained a town that only thirty to a hundred years ago possessed so many ponds, many of them still in easy recollection, to say nothing of as many more within the compass of an afternoon's walk. |
 |
 |
 |
