My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

The Delph in the River Ribble by Avenham Park Over the years, I have always been slightly confused when people mention the the necessity of 'divers' when investigating things in the River Ribble by Avenham Park, adjacent to the Old Tram Road bridge.  However, after being momentarily perplexed by it, my train of thought often moved onto something else.  More recently, when researching the history of the Lancaster Canal, I was led to an account of divers (again) fishing something out of the River Ribble in the same location.  This time, I decided to figure out why they would be needed. The answer is that there is a significantly deep 'Delph' in the River Ribble.  Strangely, whilst I thought that word was generally part of everyone's vocabulary, it turn out not to be.  I didn't pop up in online dictionaries when I did a web search.  Relatively locally, I have had conversations with people about 'Eccy Delph' (Eccleston Delph).  It turns out that Delph  comes

THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS 1862 When writing a previous post, about the history of horse racing around the Preston area, I had been looking for pictorial evidence.  This was always likely to be in the form of illustrations.  Whilst photography had been invented, as I understand it, as far back as 1822.  However, photographs would be used in publications, such as newspapers, until the 1890s.  When researching Penwortham Holme, I was led to a picture of an agricultural show that took place as part of the Preston Guild in 1862.  This in turn led me to a full piece about the occasion in the 'Illustrated London News' from that era.   The Illustrated London News was founded by Herbert Ingram and first published on Saturday 14th May 1842.  It was the world's first illustrated weekly news magazine.  It was published weekly for most of its existence.  However, it switched to a less frequent publication schedule in 1971, and eventually ceased publication in 2003.  The company contin