My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

MONUMENT TO THE LATE JOHN HORROCKS, ESQ., M.P.  Sometimes, perhaps often, things are not quite what they seem. I had been on an intermittent 'wild goose chase' looking for this monument.  I visited St. Mary's Church in Penwortham on several occasions, and whilst it wasn't the sole purpose of my visits, I was always keeping an eye out for it.  The fatal flaw was that I had made an assumption that it was outside.  I can't remember how I came to realise otherwise, but the item is safe inside the church protected from the elements.  By the time I had come to this conclusion, I had completed several dozen laps of the church graveyard.  This information is taken from the Preston Chronicle of Saturday 15th August 1863 (Issue 2692)   MONUMENT TO THE LATE JOHN HORROCKS, ESQ., M.P. Within the last few weeks, a very handsome monumental tablet has been placed in Penwortham Church, to the memory of this remarkable man, by his nephew, Mr. Walter Horrocks Whitehead, ...

The Ghost Road remains of a small section of the A49 A Cat's eye on the Ghost Road remains of the A49 The A49 is a major north-south A road in western England that runs for almost 150 miles from Bamber Bridge in Lancashire to Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire. It was modified in the Cuerden area at the end of the last century. This was done during the creation of the M65 motorway, which was constructed in stages over a sixteen-year period, with building work starting in March 1978 and finishing with the final western connection in December 1997. The original course of the road in this area was altered slightly to push it slightly further west and to straighten the section that now passes under the M65. Some of the A49s original path was built over by the M65 carriageways, but there is a short section that still remains after being cut off.  That lies within, or next to (dependant on landownership), an area to the north of Cuerden Park that was cut off from the the rest of the park ...

Ghost Sign in Lostock Hall   𝔾𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕥 𝕊𝕚𝕘𝕟 𝕚𝕟 𝕋𝕒𝕣𝕕𝕪 𝔾𝕒𝕥𝕖 - “𝕁 𝕎 𝕐𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕤. 𝔸𝕤𝕜 𝕗𝕠𝕣 ℍ𝕠𝕧𝕚𝕤” I haven't done a post about this topic for a while. However, this came to my attention this week, so I thought it warranted an early revisit. Ghost Sign in Lostock Hall This old advertisement is painted onto the north-facing wall of a building, on the junction of Coote Lane and Leyland Road, in Tardy Gate, Lostock Hall. There was another advertising billboard over the top of it, up until relatively recently, so that's probably why it is pretty well preserved. That billboard was removed some time between August 2016 and July 2017. The building was formerly used as J. W. Yates' General Store (fondly known locally as John Willies), and the painted advert comes from that time. Another source of information said that store was run by James William Yates, a “master grocer”, and he traded here from the 1920s until his death in 1954. I am not sure why some of it i...

The Sculptures of Thompson Dagnall from Liverpool  Thompson Dagnall is a British sculptor. He was born in Liverpool in 1956, and he attended Liverpool and Brighton Polytechnics before gaining an MA at Chelsea College in 1979. I first became aware of him because he worked on quite a lot of commissions in the Preston area.  It wasn't the first of  Thompson's work that I had seen, but the Crow's Nest at Lea was the first one I identified has being attributed to him.  Later, I identified other works in the area.  " Crows-Nest " The 'Crows-Nest', by Sculptor Thompson Dagnall was created in 2006 from oak and steel. It was made for the waterways trust and is positioned on Savick Brook near the end of the Ribble Link. This is intended to be a literal interpretation of the crow’s-nest on a ship atop the mast, a link between the inland waterways and the anticipation of the open sea, leading the mind out beyond the link on a maritime adventure. Dagnall wanted to giv...

The New Railway Hotel in Preston Became The Park Hotel The New Railway Hotel in Preston - The Park Hotel RAILWAY HOTEL, PRESTON - This hotel will afford an eligible opportunity for breaking a tedious railway ride, situate as it is about midway between London and Edinburgh. The building has been erected under the superintendence of Mr J B Stanley of Euston, London, the contractors being Messrs R Neill and Son of this city [ Manchester ]. The design has been to secure ready access to the station, simplicity of internal arrangement combined with picturesqueness of exterior, at a reasonable cost. The primary estimated cost was between £29,000 and £33,000. The style is ornamental. The material used is red Ruabon bricks, with Crosshill stone strings and dressings and ornamental tiles forming panels under the windows. The frontage to the south is 174 feet and to the west 152 feet. There is a coffee room on the ground floor 42 feet 6 inches by 28 feet; a drawing room, 23 feet 9 inches by 26 fe...