Tale of the three 'Cs': coal, canal and cotton

INDUSTRIAL archaeology is one of the most popular hobbies these days - thank goodness!

It is quite right that visitors in search of Lancashire's cotton history should flock to well organised museums such as Queen Street Mill and the Weavers' Triangle at Burnley, to Oswaldtwistle Mill's Time Tunnel and to the wonderful textile museum at Helmshore.

All of these gems have excellent parking areas and there are walks nearby.

We should be careful, however, not to forget that there are plenty of memories of the pre-industrial age in our area.

Before steam stormed on to the scene, the king of industry was water. Many of East Lancashire's villages had their origins because they lay on a stream which from about 1750 onwards were harnessed for powering machinery.

These places were where early industries were sited. If you visit places such as Barley, Roughlee, Barrowford, Whalley, Pendleton and Gisburn you will find evidence of those early days of water power.

The problem with water power has always been that rainfall is never reliable. There would have been no problems in 1998 and early 1999, would there? But we can all remember hot summers and droughts. I could do with another such summer! Lancashire's solution was obvious and that was to use an alternative power source and that was steam which still needed some water but the main raw material was coal.

It is hard to realise these days that the Lancashire Coalfield was one of the busiest in the world. The supply of coal was reliably delivered via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and it is true that Lancashire's prosperity was eventually dependent upon the three 'Cs' - coal, canal and cotton!

This week I gathered two old photographs together which paint a graphic picture of this period of history.

I also found an 1890's photograph of a group of ramblers around Pendleton. The scene has changed very little from the last century but the village is split in two by the stream and it is this which brought Pendleton into the industrial age. The problem with Pendleton and all other villages with water powered mills is that they were too far away from the supply routes for the raw cotton and also too far away to be able to export the finished cloth at a cost to be able to compete with town-based rivals.

Large towns like Blackburn and Burnley had steam powered mills almost everywhere and I found a picture of workers at Roe Lee taken in the early years of this century. Burnley also had large numbers of mills, many also close to the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. The Weavers' Triangle was a miracle of its age and thanks to the Weavers' Triangle Trust this miracle has survived and is now in better condition than it has been for more than a century.

The next time you stroll around our Lancashire towns and villages think about three 'Cs' and one 'W' and you will enjoy your strolls more than ever. Think coal, cotton, canals and water and you have East Lancashire in a nutshell.

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