DELVING into the past of Mellor, near Blackburn, to produce a history of the hilltop village as part of its projects to celebrate the new millennium, local resident Neil Summersgill has amassed an amazing amount of information - and more than 100 photographs, many of which have not been published before.

The feat is all the more remarkable since, by his own account, it is a place that probably did not exist as a village until the late 18th century, suffered such a severe population decline towards the end of the next century that many of its cottages were deserted and was transformed in the following one from being a village into "just a place to live" for commuters.

Indeed, the ups and downs of Mellor were noted by in the late Victorian age by the village's redoubtable vicar, the Rev. G.R.G. Pughe when it's fortunes were at such an ebb that he said it was "fast becoming a deserted village."

In essence, as Mr Summersgill records, Mellor's development followed that of the Lancashire textile industry - it first becoming a cohesive village with the development around 1780 of the handloom weaving industry and the cottages that accommodated it and an accompanying influx of population.

This suffered decline as people deserted to work in the mechanised mills in Blackburn that replaced a craft that saw the last piece of hand-woven cloth finished in Mellor in 1890. The opening of Mellor's own power loom shed at Elswick Mill in 1878 and the building by its owners, the Smalley family, of terraced housing for workers helped to stem the decline though by the time of its closure in 1960, the transformation of Mellor into a virtual suburb of Blackburn was complete.

But in other ways progress by-passed the hilltop settlement on whose heights the Romans established a signalling station, for it was not until the end of the Second World War that the greater part of the village received modern services such as a reliable water supply and public transport.

But if in the span of more than two millennia that his book covers, Mellor only truly emerged as a village in the past 200 years, the sheer volume of fascinating facts that Mr Summersgill has painstakingly unearthed from more than 60 separate sources makes it a place with quite a long and interesting story to tell.

The History of Mellor in Lancashire, by Neil Summersgill, published by the Mellor Community Project Group, £9.99.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.