A little about Littleborough

Littleborough is a typical small Pennine town, stone built but softened by trees and flowers, big enough to have its own comprehensive shopping centre and varied social life but small enough to have its own identity and its own - friendly and informal - way of doing things.

The hills dominate - Blackstone Edge to the east, sweeping up to the rocky heights of Robin Hood’s Bed and the Lancashire Pennines to the west. Once they formed a continuous arc but the receding glaciers of the Ice Age changed all that, carving out the Summit Pass, 300 feet deep and half-a-mile wide, creating one of the few low level routes between Lancashire and Yorkshire. This is a landscape on a grand scale and give Littleborough a great deal of the Great Outdoors right on the doorstep.

Littleborough is on the A58 Rochdale-Halifax road with Exit 21 on the M62 a couple of miles away. Fourteen miles (half an hour by train) from Manchester. With that Great Outdoors practically encircling restaurants and accommodation for visitors looking for a longer stay.

This is a place where it’s a pleasure to walk, too - a gentle stroll up the Ealees valley to the Hollingworth Lake Country Park or something more challenging - along the canal towpath then up out of the valley to the Reddyshore Scout Gate, an ancient packhorse road along the rim of the Summit Pass or perhaps up on to the high moor of Blackstone Edge with its unique paved Roman road and the skyline Pennine Way. There’s the new Pennine Bridleway as well.

In the town centre new buildings are sympathetic to the old and when it comes to shopping there’s a lot more than meets the eye. Books to bacon and Brussels sprouts, cards, collectibles, cakes, computers and casual fashion, designer footwear and delicatessen, painting and prints, pottery and potted plants, aromatherapy and antiques, fresh fish, furniture and flowers.

As 'Lancashire Magazine' said: “Here is a little town offering all the benefits of a caring society, with small, privately owned shops giving quality and service that supermarkets and shopping malls can never provide. You emerge from such shops feeling like an important customer - which of course you are - and glowing with the warmth of your welcome”.

Heritage - that unique ‘weave’ of History, Landscapes and People - produces a particularly rich fabric in this corner of the South Pennines. The long warp threads are the historic transport routes linking Lancashire and Yorkshire - packhorse roads, some of them based on prehistoric trade routes, turnpike roads with their characteristic toll houses and the first canal and railway to conquer the Pennines. Even the M62 trans- Pennine motorway has its place in that story now.

The weft threads that give strength and colour to the fabric? Moorland pasture and ample water that gave rise to the early woollen industry. Cotton came later - and both were important in this borderland where the Roses Counties meet. The Co-operative Movement was born here and Chartism and Non-conformism were strong influences. And above all People. Renowned engineers like William Jessop who built the canal, George Stephenson who built the railway which turned a scattering of moor-edge hamlets into a small town in less than fifty years, and of course so-called ‘ordinary people’ - the thousands of navvies and miners who built the canal and the railway and the mighty Summit Tunnel (and the later generation which battled to build the M62). The local people were resourceful, innovative and indominatable. They still are.

There are older echoes too - of the Celts, Danes and Vikings, all of whom left their mark in the place names and dialect. There are reminders of Romans and whispers of Robin Hood around his Rocky Bed on Blackstone Edge.

This is a place where old family names endure and old customs survive or have been revived. The origins or Rushbearing, a festival unique to the South Pennines are lost in the mists of time but it developed into the main summer festival centered on a gaily decorated cart piled high with rushes cut on the moors and destined for the local church to be used as a winter floor covering for the local church. Stern 19th century clergy disapproved of the drinking, dancing and lewd and lascivious dancing’ associated with the festival and by the end of the century Rushbearing had died out in most places. Littleborough was one of those places but a growing sense of local identity led to its revival in 1991. ‘Lancashire Day’ on November 27th is celebrated too. This commemorates the date in the year 1295 when the County Palatine of Lancaster returned its first elected Members to the Westminster Parliament and celebrates the unique relationship Lancastrians have with their Monarch HM The Queen, Duke of Lancaster.

It’s popularity isn’t surprising. Around the lake are pubs, restaurants and Cafes (and a number of Guest Houses) and on the lake are sailing dinghies, rowing boats and windsurfers - as well as the venerable but immaculate ‘Lady Alice’ on her round-the-lake cruise. An excellent Visitor Centre provides information on the lake area and is the base for a network of waymarked trails. Nearby is the Hollingworth Leisure Park, a recent innovation based on a renowned Equestrian Centre.

And all this - lake and town - set against a spectacular Pennine backdrop.

Text and photographs by K. Parry.