A £2.4 MILLION funding bid to protect and transform Pendle Hill into a major tourist attraction has been submitted.

Five full-time roles and 20 new apprentices could be created if the Pendle Hill Landscape Partnership is successful.

MORE TOP STORIES:

The four-year project by the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding National Beauty (AONB) wants to safeguard the heritage of the hill which at 557-metre attracts walkers on a daily basis, but is facing habitat problems due to climate change and the intensification of farming.

The AONB also wants to improve people’s access to the area.

If the funding bid is successful, the team will embark on exploratory work in January and then deliver the three-year project from 2018.

A dozen different schemes are included in the plan which it is hoped will boost the local economy by making the area a key tourist destination by 2022.

Young people would be taught rural and heritage skills; Pendle Hill’s contribution to people’s health and wellbeing will be explored; local history groups will find out about the histories of various houses in the villages; there will be a series of projects researching and interpreting the non-conformist free thinkers Pendle Radicals and several art commissions.

Sandra Silk, of the Forest of Bowland AONB, said her colleague Cathy Hopley had been working on the bid for 18 months and finally submitted it on Thursday.

She said: “If it comes off it should be a great programme of work for four years.”

The team should hear whether they have been successful in December.

Cathy Hopley, said: “Pendle Hill acts as a weather vane to many of us, and is a constant backdrop to our lives, yet it has two very different and divided sides.

These differences are rooted in its geology – the lighter limestones and shale on the Ribble Valley slopes, and the darker millstone grit and siltstones facing the towns of Colne, Nelson and Burnley.”

  • The name "Pendle Hill" combines the words for hill from three different languages.

In the 13th century it was called Pennul or Penhul, apparently from the Cumbric pen and Old English hyll, both meaning “hill”.

The modern English “hill” was appended later, after the original meaning of Pendle had become opaque, although traditionalist locals insist on “Pendle”.