A rich seam of history

READERS of colleague Ron Freethy take over Looking Back today as his popular Friday feature, Drive and Stroll, is blacked out because we are not publishing on Boxing Day.

But, responding to Ron's request for memories of our local history, the gap is filled by reader Jim Ashton, with a splendid account of bygone times in Huncoat and Altham, and Albert Morris's fascinating peep into Pendle's past.

Jim writes: "I remember the railway station at Huncoat which brings back happy memories to me of when I was a teenager more than 50 years ago.

"The station was built in 1902 and replaced a former station that was situated on the Hapton side of the railway bridge on Altham lane when the East Lancashire Railway Company first came through to Huncoat in 1848.

"Now owned by Railtrack, today's station of two two clear plastic shelters is totally different from the old red brick structure of 1902, which included two large waiting rooms, a booking office, a porters' room, a lamp room and ladies' and gents' toilets.

"A well-known feature of the London, Midland and Scottish station was the level crossing, where the four gates were manually operated by the signalman in the nearby signal box. The level crossing gates were replaced a few years ago by a continental barrier type of crossing.

"This busy little station was a hive of activity, where the signalman, a station master, a booking clerk and two porters dealt with the daily task of handling several hundred passengers and many tons of freight.

"This freight included cotton, bricks and coal which came from the three thriving village industries, each situated within a few yards of the station. These three popular places of employment provided full-time work and a decent living wage for many residents of Huncoat.

"They were the Perseverance Mill, the Redac brickworks and the Broadmeadow Colliery, better known throughout the district as "Thuncoyte Pit."

"The station also had to handle a great tonnage of coke, hauled to the station from Altham along a mineral railway that connected the Moorfield coke works with the railway sidings.

"Next to the coke works at Altham was the Moorfield Colliery, where a disastrous underground explosion tragically killed 68 men and boys on November 7, 1883. "Four small steam locomotives, named Kestrel, Raven, Linnet and Lark, shared in the duties of hauling the coal between Huncoat and Altham. A prominent feature of the railway was the viaduct that spanned the Tom Brook Valley and was situated in front of the Nearer Holker House Farm. The farm buildings are now better known as the RSPCA animal shelter.

"Many more tons of coal, mined at the Calder Pit, at Altham, arrived at the station via the aerial flight that carried tubs of coal, suspended from an overhead cable, across the fields between the Altham and Huncoat pits. Here, it was loaded into 12-ton railway wagons then taken to the station sidings to join the many freight wagons waiting to be hauled on to the main line railway by larger LMS steam locomotives for distribution to various parts of the country."

Following Ron's recent journey into the past on the road to Roughlee, in Pendle, 76-year-old Albert Morris wrote in with his boyhood recollections of the area.

Albert, of Clement View, Nelson, writes: "I had an aunt and uncle who lived at Waterfall Cottage in Roughlee for some time and I stayed with them for the six-week school holidays for some years and was friendly with Denis and Crithea Florey, who were around my age.

"They lived at Brooklands, a detached house at the opposite end of Waterfall Cottages. Mr Florey built the semi-detached bungalows on the road to the Watermeetings.

"My relations moved to a cottage at Thorneyholme and kept hens. I used to walk from Higherford all the way along the Watermeetings fields, on to the Blacko-Roughlee road and through Roughlee and past Happy Valley to clean out two hen huts each Saturday morning.

"As regards the old mill lodge at Roughlee, in those days, the mill was almost derelict and at one time was the works for the Roughlee Laundry.

"Another snippet of interest was that, around 1947, a chap called George Bond had a couple of old farm buildings were he sold wireless sets and photographic equipment. His place was in a field not far from the pub, a little further along towards the falls. "Later a chap called Harold Robinson, who lived at one of the Waterfall Cottage houses, started selling household bleach. Snow-white, I think he called it.

"I talked to his dad for the last time before he died when I was filming the flood damage in 1967 when the road was damaged at the falls. The Happy Valley tea rooms had been flooded and the railings alongside the bridge and near the river there had been flattened. I also have film of the damage at Higherford on Foreside, where the bridge had been blocked with trees and other floating debris, causing a build-up of water which knocked down much of the river wall."

For Ron, Albert's recollections brought back pleasant memories as, for 10 years in the 1980s, he lived at Thorneyholme Hall and used the old cottage as a study.

Albert says: "When I was about five or six, this particular building was being used as a bottling factory by Armistead's Mineral Waters. I lived opposite, just below at the house next to St Peter and St Paul's Church.

"The bottling place used the old 'glass-marble' bottles, which I have described in length in a book I have written about it all, called Memories of the 1920s and 30s in Barrowford and Nelson, which is to be published shortly. "The line along the factory wall shows where another building's roof started. This, even in the early 1920s, was a ruin where many self-seeded tress grew on the roof of the underground malt kilns, which are still there, as is also the tunnel built under Gisburn Road, connecting the kilns with what was then the brewery on the opposite side of the road.

"After it was converted to a corn mill, steam wagons came there with sacks of maize, wheat and locust-bean pods - soft, sweet and syrupy and about the side of broad bean pods. We kids were always shouting up to the man who winched up the sacks to the top floor to throw us some down. The contents of the sacks were ground up and compressed into cattle cake and hen food pellets in the converted brewery building. In recent years, the front of the building, with its loading bay and hoist above, was removed to make a parking space.

"At the back of the building in the photograph there was, until recently, a riding school. In the 1920s, until the mid-'30s, it was a cattle, pig and horse market whose advertising leaflets said it was 'one minute from the tram.' The terminus was then outside Higherford Mill.

"In the past, this area of Higherford was a busy place with much of interest and the old brewery has known some changes, being in turn a brewery, the Spice Factory, the Higherford Confectionery Works and, finally, the corn mill owned by Nelson Cornmills until it closed down in the late 1930s."

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