Chapter 1
Well adapted to the Production of almost every vegetable

Dense forests from Penwortham to the Dee extended inland to a line through Longton, Rufford and Ormskirk - that is the picture given by the earliest maps of the area called Belisima by the Romans.

North of Southport, we still have North Meols - "nine miles long with the sea on one side and the mosses and marshes of Scarisbrick and Halsall fringing Martin Mere, on the other". (Meols - Scandinavian for a "sand hill" with "North" to distinguish it from the earlier Norse settlement on the Wirral - pronounced "Mells".) The Anglo-Saxon chronicle recalls the conquest of North Meols in 923 by the English King and its transfer from Northumbria to Mercia. At the time of the Norman conquest there were only 10,000-12,000 people living in the area between the Mersey and the Ribble. Ecclesiastical allegiance was to Lichfield until the foundation of the Chester Diocese in 1541.

Even though the coastline was cut off from the inland areas by marsh and bog, Danes and Norsemen "who infested the Irish Sea during the century preceding the Norman invasion" found it easy to land - particularly via the Alt and Douglas. The pre conquest name was Otegrimele and there were five manors. Charles Leigh commented in 1700 on the wilderness of North Meols and the small number of people. "It is little more cultivated than the deserts of Arabia" he said.

To stand in the centre of the area, before 1700, was literally a case of "water, water, everywhere!" The Ribble Estuary, far narrower than now, to the left; behind you the sea at what is now Southport - coming in further than we realise. There was enough sea in the early days of the resort to attract more visitors than Blackpool. Ahead was the Douglas and, ultimately, the Ribble. To the right, up to 1849, was Martin Mere, in its day one of the largest lakes in England - bigger than Windermere, shallow but with three islands; an area of 3,000 acres with a circumference of 18 miles from Crossens to Rufford. Originally it extended so much into North Meols at one point it was separated from the sea only by a narrow neck of land.

One writer has pointed out that by the time you reach Hesketh Bank and Tarleton you had almost entered two "moated" villages - "moats" in the form of the Douglas, the Ribble and Martin Mere, with the only permanent road out eastwards through Sollom and Rufford, and with even that liable to occasional flooding.

Thomas Fleetwood of Bank Hall was the first to attempt drainage. "A man truly ingenious, urbane and pleasant" says the Latin inscription in St Cuthbert's Church. "By means of a sluice communication with the adjoining sea, he drained and made arable the immense Meer of Martin - an enterprise which former generations dare not attempt." A desire to improve the land - and a weariness with the arguments about rights relating to the mere - spurred him on, and authority to do the work came from an Act of Parliament of 1692. two thousand labourers were employed and, amongst other things, they found a dug out canoe and the antlers of a red deer - 8,000 years old. The items are on display in the Botanic Gardens Museum.

The drainage and cultivation caused a shrinkage of the low ying peat surface and the increasing deposit of marine silt on the foreshore raised the level of the estuary channel.Mud and silt from Liverpool Bay also chocked the outfall and high seas - perticularly in 1755 - ruined what Fleetwood had attempted. In 1781, through the initiative of Thomas Eccleston, John Gilbert, Enginner of the Bridgewater Canal, was brought in to construct a tripple set of gates between the lake exit and the Crossens Sluice on the right of the road leading to Banks village. Fleetwood had been ahead of his time; Gilbert was of the generation bringing about agricultural improvements in tandem with the industrial revolution going on in the towns.

Many acres of land were reclaimed and Eccleston received the gold medal of "The Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacture & Commerce". Storms in 1813 threatened Gilbert's outer gates and they were replaced by cast iron cylinders with valves operated in conjunction with the pumping station. In the area he owned, Thomas Hesketh of Rufford built a drainage reservoir into which water was directed for pumping into the sluice by a steam engine.

The drainage of Martin Mere thus took 150 years and, since then, the local scenery has been man-made. A bigger drainage scheme came into operation in 1961 with a new pumping station. It was, at the time, the third largest of its kind in the country, costing £1,000,000 and serving 36,000 acres. 32 miles of channel were excavated and 35 new bridges built. When Princess Alexandra opened the scheme, it was heralded as "a prototype for modern land drainage schemes where the water table is to be controlled in relation to agricultural operations." "Stop the pumps here," they tell you at the pumping station "and Martin Mere would be back again in no time".

The boulder from Dumfiesshire on display across the road from the pumping station and the Eskdale granite and mountain limestone boulders in Crossens churchyard are reminders of the Ice Age earth movements which have resulted in the coastline from the Ribble to the suburban fringe of Merseyside being labelled the richest agricultural area of Lancashire. "Boulder clay deposits between Crossens and Hesketh Bank," says William Ashton in The Battle of Land and Sea "are similar to those near Llandudno, Colwyn Bay and the Clwyd Valley on the one hand and Blackpool and Fleetwood on the other".

This boulder clay is interlaid with sand and peat and, according to Hall and Folland in Soils of Lancashire, the country's most extensive deposit of peat "extends in a cresent south of the Ribble from Banks and Tarleton in the north and to Maghull in the south with easterly extensions to Rufford and Tarlescough " - near the Martin Mere wildfowl establishment. There is also a large isolated area of peat on Longton Moss. The peat varies in depth from three to nine feet and it is covered, particularly on Tarleton Moss and sporadically between Churchtown and Tarlescough, by shallow raised moss peat.

With its topping of sandy loam the peat is "well adapted to the production of almost every vegetable that has yet been brought under cultivation" according to John Holt in 1795. "It is impossible to estimate," he said, "the advantage which might be obtained by improved and superior management." Before chemical fertilisers, the boulder clay from under the surface and the sea sludge from the Ribble were spread over the land as a substitute for the "marling" dug from the pits in other parts of the country.

Once drained and cultivated, the peat areas have lived up to John Holt's prophecy and have become very fertile. Market Gardens have developed as land has become available from trhe large estates. There is a mild coastal climate but it is the soil rather than the weather which is the main reason for the specialisation which now exists. The variety in what is grown arises from local variations in the type of soil. Clay was, in the past, used for brick making - Brick Kiln Lane in Banks is a reminder of this - and stones from the deposit, rounded by ice and water, were useful for cobble stone pavements and housebuilding in Churchtown.

It was on the ridge of boulder clay going through Burscough - now the A59 - that the Romans travelled north. The country westward was so wild and isolated that they generally avoided any excursions into it, except to establish crossings of the Douglass at Rufford and Tarleton. Any travel they undertook within the area seems to have been along the side of the estuary.

Because of this lack of development, travelling from Southport to Preston - even in the early 1800's - was via badly maintained lanes as far as Tarleton, where you could join the slightly better Liverpool/Preston turnpike road, which was in existanceas early as 1777. It is prominant on the map of 1786 and was 30 miles long - three times the length of other Lancashire turnpikes. In the Tarleton/Preston stretch, the toll centres were at Tarleton, Bretherton and Penwortham. But surfaces were not good and shire horses had to leave Tarleton as early as 2:00am to be at Preston Market for the 5:00am opening.

An 1838 report suggests that there were even greater problems in the Crossens/Tarleton lanes leading to the turnpike. A corresponding to the present-day Marsh Lane in Banks (until fairly recently called Shore Rd) has existed for seven centuries but the original track was further inland because of the extent of the sea shore. Such roads, according to the report, were "so sloughy that horses drag loads of produce from Preston market over so-called roads in Banks with broad appendages to their feet called pattens to prevent them sinking knee-deep".

The only direct coach service between Southport and Preston was begun in July 1833 by H Scofield, with coaches leaving the Hesketh Arms, Churchtown, every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:00am and at 6:00am on Saturday. The return was from the New Cock Inn on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 4:00pm. As late as 11th February 1888, the Preston Guardian reported that "the portion of the main Southport to Preston road between Banks and Tarleton is in a very unsafe and neglected condition owing to the rough materials used on the pavement and to the wide drains which run almost the entire length of the road andto want of proper and sufficient fencing to protect the traffic along the road from the ditches." Mr Hodge, Surveyor of Roads, who wrote the report quoted in the paper, described Southport as "moated off". "This delightful watering place," he said, "is stated to be the only town in the Kingdom that is specified on the cyclists' map as being only approachable by railway!"

And even the railway was late in the day in serving Southport and Preston. The first part of the Liverpool/Southport line was opened as early as June 1848;Stephenson died in the August. The link operated from 1855 with an extension to Manchester six years later. But is was 1878 before the Southport to Preston linestarted to function and then only as far as Hesketh Bank. The full line was not ready until 1882. The West Lancashire Railway, brainchild of the Southport city fathers who feared the monopoly of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, was completed eleven years after approval, yet the line only operated under its own steam for eight years. It went bankrupt because the line was too short to be viable; there was not enough commuter traffic and the area served by the line did not develop as it might have done.

A branch was constructed from Longton to the Blackburn line but, because the company was so impecunious, it was impossible to buy new rolling stock for the extended service. The line, therefore, had the distinction of using some second-hand carriages and engines - yellow with dark green edging - from the very progressive London, Brighton & South Coast Railway. There was even the suggestion of developing Crossens as a west coast Grimsby. But - and it is again an indication of the quietness of the area - the line had the dubious distinction of being mentioned in the Beeching Report, eventually closing in 1964. Poor as business might have appeared to Dr Beeching, the railway was a particular help to children travelling to and from school and to holiday makers coming to Southport from Scotland.

Because the area was so untouched by the transport revolution and the new roads, the waterways - the Ribble, the Douglas and with it the Leeds Liverpool Canal - were important.

Chapter 2
A River of Romance and an Interesting Waterway

Rising near Rivington, the Douglas flows via Horwich and Blackrod to Wigan, where it passes through a coalfield. Passing through Parbold and Rufford to Tarleton, the Douglass eneters the Ribble Estuary at Hesketh Bank opposite Freckleton Naze. A mile from Tarleton, the Douglass is joined by the Yarrow, which rises on Rivington Moor and passes through Duxbury Park, near Chorley, Eccleston and Croston. Water from Martin Mere also flowed into the Douglas. It has, therefore, always been a vital outlet for the drainage of a large part of Lancashire.

The lower reaches of the Douglas have traditionally been called the "Asland" ("Ash-Land"), a title aptly describing the hazels and nuts once common along the river bank. These reaches were hiding places for large serpents or pythons, Vikings sailed here, but a claim that is said to be without foundation is that "Asland" is really "Dubglass" in the tales of King Arthur. There is a relevant passage in Tennyson:

Lancelot spoke
And answered him in full, as having been
With Arthur in the fight which, all day long,
Raged by the white mouth of the violent Clem;
And in the four wild battles by the shore
Of Douglas.

"The Douglas," says one of the King Arthur/river Douglas enthusiasts, "from its birth in Rivington Pike to its being swallowed up by Old Father Neptune to me has a glamour of its own which nought can foil."

Scholars, however, dismiss this special claim to fame as being "derived from a passage in the spurious Welsh compilation of the legends". "The true character of the presumed Arthurian victorieson the Douglas have not been demonstrated with such certainty as to obtain universal assent" says another authority.

Almost a river of romance, and certainly a river upon which the area depends for its water safety, the Douglas has been vital to the prosperity of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank. There are records from the 1500's concerning iron, salt, oats, wheat, sacks of peas and herrings coming ashore from the banks of the Douglas. Thanks to the ingenuity of Thomas Steeres, one of the first Englishmen to enter the full-time profession of civil engineering, work started in 1719 to make the Douglas navigable for small ships to and from the Wigan coalfield. "The making of this river navigable from the River Ribble to a place called Mirey Lane End in the township of Wigan will be very beneficial to trade, advantageous to the poor and convenient for the carriage of coals, cannel, stone, slate and other goods and merchandise," said the preamble to the Act of Parliament authorising the work, which was not approved without opposition. The Bill was sponsored by William Squire and Thomas Steeres, "Gentlemen of Liverpool", and the freight rates were 2/6d a ton.

In 1715 Steeres had built Liverpool's first dock and he was also involved in navigation schemes for the Mersey, the Irwell, the Weaver and the Newry Canal in his native Ireland. The Douglas development was one of the many schemes for making rivers navigable associated with the South Sea Bubble,. The work was achieved with difficulty - the first surveys had been carried out in 1711 but it was 1742 before it was ready for shipping; there were "financial difficulties with more than a suspicion of fraud". In addition to accidents, navigators' lives were lost through drinking bouts and disease. The area of Plox Brow - down Coe Lane, opposite St Mary's (Tarleton) and turn right - was where the labourers lived rough. When the river became navigable, caroges were transferred to larger vessels at the enterance to the Ribble. These ocean going ships then sailed to Ireland and other ports in this country. Coal went, via the Ribble, to a quay near the foot of Fishergate, where it helped to meet the needs of the growing industrial activities of Preston.

However, the pioneering venture was overtaken in 1774, when Wigan was provided with more elaborate inland navigation by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. Completed in 1781, long before the main canal was ready, the Rufford branch ran from Burscough to a junction with the Douglas at Tarleton - a distance of 7.5 miles. The final stretch takes over the original course of the river, with the new course coming along side the canal just above Tarleton. There are remains of an obsolete lock at Sollom. "The channel takes on the appearance of a Fenland Dyke through tall reeds," says one waterway writer. Canal and river merge, via a solid lock, about half a mile from Tarleton on the Hesketh Bank side.

One of the first actions of the Leeds and Liverpool company was to buy out the old River Douglas Navigation. The locking of the canal into the Douglas allowed schooners of 80 to 90 feet into the canal basin at Tarleton, where cargoes could be transfered to barges. One of the conditions of the takeover was that the canal company would continue to maintain the Douglas and its banks. In 1857 training walls were built between Hesketh Bank and the entrance of the Douglas into the Ribble. The stone for the walls came from Parbold.

By the early 1800's there was enough trade to justify a customs officer at Hesketh Bank and, in 1850, 100 vessels arrived with cargo from overseas - three times that number called in coastal trading activities. Coal came in from Wigan and gunpowder went there for the pits, together with iron for furnaces from Millom. "The coasting trade of the Douglas and the canal connected with it," said an 1891 report, "is considerable."

But an Act of 1855, imposing dues on shipping using the Douglas, was ultimatly to be the death knoll for the trade. The customs officer was withdrawn in 1859. However, sea-going activities still continue and the Shell Book of Inland Waterways describes the present day Tarleton Boatyard as "useful and catering mainly for sea-going craft". "The final lock falls to the tidal Douglas and is operable at high water; only 4 miles of the original 17.5 miles is now navigable," says the book.

 

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