My Lancashire - My accounts of the local area

  The Remains of Preston's Third Town Hall A journey to Howick Cross In January 2023, on a pleasant but very cold day, I went for a walk along the Ribble Way on the section from Penwortham Holme towards the western end of the route that ultimately ends at the Dolphin Inn pub in the marshes of Longton village. The river has a lot of reinforcement around that area, I presume to help prevent erosion.  This includes rubble that I think came from the old Penwortham Power Station and a section of more formal gabions (wire mesh crates with rubble inside them stack upon each other like bricks) to protect the feet of the electricity pylons that take the high tension cable across the River Ribble.  The remains mainly consist of reinforced concrete sections and red brick as you first leave Holme Road toward the marshes.  This led me to speculate that it was from a relatively modern structure.  A View of Preston from Howick Cross However, when I reach the point where Mill Brook flows into the

Fall Of Thirteen Arches,  of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway. Following on from my post about the Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge", I put the old picture looking from Miller Park and my photograph of the top of a buried arch on a local social media group.  That solicited a comment from a group member that pointed towards an old news article. Hidden Viaduct near Preston, once know as "The Blue Bridge" This news article revealed that there had been problems with the arches during the construction, and this actually led to thirteen of them collapsing.  It was entitled "Fall of Thirteen Arches of the Ribble Viaduct on the Preston Extension of the East Lancashire Railway".  It came from the Preston Guardian published on Saturday 27th October 1849.  I ran the scanned image of the newspaper extract through an online OCR (optical character recognition) software process and converted the image in

The Hidden Viaduct of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway The Old Railway Line On a personal level, I am familiar with the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, or at least the disused sections around Preston and South Ribble.  I used to cross a section near Bamber Bridge on may way to school in the mid nineteen-seventies, and I am sure that there were still a few goods trains pulling loads of oil tankers crossing Brownedge Road (Brownedge Lane) that occasionally stopped us if I'd gone to school on the 113 bus.  Passenger services had long since stopped and when the goods trains had also ceased, the rail company ('British Rail') quite quickly removed the infrastructure.  This was definitely the rails and sleepers, but perhaps not the ballast straight away.  From that point forward, it became the playground of a few of the local children, myself included. Brownedge Level Crossing, Bamber Bridge around 1905 At that point, we often would have adventures in the remains of Todd Lan

Preston's Windmills Part 1 I have always been interested in windmills.  We are fortunate to have a number of surviving examples dotted around Lancashire, and some of them are in a state of good repair.  The ones on the Flyde Coast including Marsh Mill at Thornton-Cleveleys, Little Marton Windmill and Lytham Windmill are all well known.  I can't recall having been inside any of these buildings, but I might have done in the past.  The last working example I had the pleasure of viewing the inner workings of was on the outskirts of York.  This was Holgate Windmill, which is York's last surviving windmill and apparently the oldest five-sailed windmill in the country.  That's certainly worth a visit.  It's also quite unique, in the sense that it is on an island in a street, surrounded by houses. I have only really recently become aware of the history of Preston's windmills.  Something led me to Craggs Row Windmill several years ago, whilst on one of my journeys down a