Brockholes Nature Reserve just outside Preston is a remarkable initiative of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. I am old enough to remember the building of Britain’s first motorway. And it wasn’t the M1; it was the M6 Preston bypass. For almost forty years I would regularly drive the seven or eight miles from home to join the motorway at Junction 31, very often turning north over the Ribble bridge and passing the gravel pits below. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would one day be a wildlife haven down beneath that busy road. But today this is the reality.

The whole area is being transformed, and earlier this year the Trust opened its innovative floating visitor centre. Yes, even the restaurant and shops float on the water. This is not the kind of nature reserve on which green-clad middle-aged adults, toting long-lensed cameras and field glasses, move slowly around the paths like Trappist monks under vow of silence. There is a place for that kind of reserve, but this one is different. It describes itself as an “unreserved reserve” and welcomes the chatter of children.

There are family events of many kinds including recently a food festival and something called “Pumpkin Mania” which I’m sure you had to see to believe. The events calendar has recently included an evening on “Exotic wildlife photography”. There are organised walks, including Sunday afternoon (two and a half hours) guided tours of the reserve, and Wednesday afternoon one-hour “meanders”. Yes this reserve is for wildlife; but it is also for people.

Even the business world is catered for. There’s no anti-business greenery here. A well-appointed meetings centre is available for hire and, unlike so many cafes and restaurants with their “no meetings” notices, people are actively encouraged to leave the M6 and stop off to meet colleagues and customers around a table while floating on the lake.

But don’t be deceived. There’s also a serious conservation agenda here. There’s woodland, wet grassland, hay meadow, and of course the water. These are all being managed with a view to developing Brockholes as a wonderful place for birds, mammals and other wildlife as well as their human observers.

Now for an admission. I’ve written that entirely from what I’ve been told. No longer living in the area I haven’t yet visited Brockholes for myself (hence no picture here) – but it’s very definitely on the agenda. Congratulations to the Lancashire Wildlife Trust for a splendid initiative.

Read more at Brockholes.org.

See also: “Nature in the North”

Last week I mentioned some of the items on the blog that had received most attention since they were published. One of these was on Towneley Hall, Burnley.  The picture there was taken from my copy of the 1909 brochure, so I thought that today I’d put up here one of my own photos from a visit in January 2010.

Towneley Hall, Burnley, January 2010

I also referred to the glorious Hodder Valley.  The emphasis there was on the Hodder river itself, but nearby there is Stoneyhurst College, just outside the village of Hurst Green. Maybe I’ll write more about both of these great Lancashire buildings in the future, but for the present here’s another photo.

Stoneyhurst College, Hurst Green, Lancashire, August 2009

This morning I decided to take a look at the visitor statistics for the Around-England blog, and got some surprises.

The most visited places on the blog

Previously, if anyone had asked me which had been the most popular items I might have guessed at some of my posts about the Lake District.  For example, recently there were:

Holehird Gardens, Windermere and  Wordsworth and the Lake District Rivers

Going further back in time there were:

The Ruskin Monument – Coniston and  Visiting Coniston in Winter

However, it was none of the above that headed the list. Rather, apart from people arriving at whatever was at the time on the site’s front page, the most frequent entry point was a story I wrote some time ago on my childhood and teenage memories of Towneley Hall, Burnley:

Burnley, Lancashire – Towneley Hall and Woodland Park

Close second (actually joint-second) was another Lancashire location. Many people searched the site for Bowland, and its incredibly beautiful River Hodder took that second place:

The Hodder – Lancashire’s Most Beautiful River

Partnering the Hodder in second place was the first Lake District item:

Dove Cottage, Grasmere on Old Postcards

Maybe at some time I should write more about my collection of old Lake District postcards.  It’s not large, but I enjoy it.

“Cromwell’s Bridge” – from Lower Hodder Bridge on a rainy day

What does all this mean?

I’m not sure what lessons to draw from this quick look at the statistics, but I’ll keep watching in an attempt to understand what people find most interesting. Maybe it’s just that there are many other souces of information about the Lake District whereas fewer people write about Lancashire.

However, as someone born in the part of present-day Cumbria that used to be Lancashire, and remembering that Windermere and Coniston Water used to be known as the “Lancashire Lakes”, I guess I’ll keep on writing about both counties – and not forgetting my wife’s family background east of the Pennines in Yorkshire, the birth-county of three of my four grandchildren.

Yes I can admire, indeed love, many other areas of England and will continue to post articles now and again even about the deep south, but I’m unashamedly a Northerner and will continue to make “The Case for the North”.

Incidentally, the most common search term that led people to the blog from Google was especially surprising: Wastwater Gnomes.

I have written several times recently about the River Ribble and its tributaries, especially the Hodder.   Now, here is a new book to enjoy.

The Ribble is substantially a Lancashire river, but in fact rises in the heights above the Yorkshire Dales. These are outstanding landscapes, walking-country par excellence, from the bleakness of the river’s origins to the lushness of the mid and lower stretches of the Ribble Valley, and out past the old Preston Docks to the estuary at Lytham.

This new volume, Landscapes of the Ribble, by photographer Andy Latham (it is his first book) will be a welcome addition to the library of any lover of the region and its rivers.

Book Details:
ISBN-10: 0711230285  -  ISBN-13: 978-0711230286
Publisher: Frances Lincoln (2010)
112 pages; hardcover; 26.8 x 25.4 x 2.4 cm
Cover price: £16.99

As of 15th January Landscapes of the Ribble was priced on Amazon.co.uk at only £9.54.

In previous articles I’ve referred to my love of the River Hodder in Lancashire.  Recently I came across some photographs taken one very snowy Saturday morning in, I think, 1991 (or it may have been 1992). It was a splendidly crisp day, and great to walk where no man had gone before, as it were.  I started by the Hodder itself, and then decided to drive into the Trough of Bowland and walk up by the Langden Brook, one of the smaller streams that feeds the Hodder.  I’d lost the photographs for many years, but have never lost the memory.

The Hodder near Dunsop Bridge (1991?)

Got here before the gritters

Looking down on the Waterworks, Langden Valley, Bowland

I’m the first here – apart from the sheep

The snow is thinner here – but desolate for miles now

As I’ve said before, the Hodder with its villages, and the Trough of Bowland deserve to be much better known – but don’t come in droves will you; I’d like to see it stay peaceful.

As I looked around this morning for something that illustrated the challenges faced by people during this period of unfamiliarly heavy and protracted snowfall in England I came across the following.  It gives a down-to-earth description of the situation for many of the people who produce our food.  The rest of us should be grateful.

From the Lancashire Telegraph

East Lancashire snow: How farmers are coping

Monday, 11th January 2010, By Emma Cruces »

“THE big freeze has left East Lancashire farmers working around the clock to keep their animals fed and watered. ……….”

[And I liked the pragmatic get-on-and-do-it attitude of the closing sentences:] 
” You couldn’t prepare for it, even if you knew, and you couldn’t do anything more. At the end of the day it’s the same for lots of people. You still have to make a shilling, so you get on with it.”

Full article »

“Lancashire” – to many outside the Northwest of England the county name conjures up mental images of congested  towns full of blackened mills and street upon street of grubby ‘back-to-back’ houses.  Having grown up in Burnley then lived for several decades in Darwen and Blackburn I can confirm that there is a degree of reality in such an image.  But there’s more, much more. Lancashire is a county of many rivers.  Today it’s the Hodder on my mind.

“Cromwell’s Bridge” – from Lower Hodder Bridge on a rainy day

Historically the county of Lancashire stretched from the Mersey to the Duddon.  Between these lay the valleys of the Irwell, the Ribble and the Lune with their various tributaries, not to mention the collection of smaller shorter rivers spilling into Morecambe Bay from the southern lakes of what is now Cumbria.

The Ribble flows into the sea at Preston, having in the previous ten miles or so taken in the waters of the Darwen, the Calder and the Hodder.  The last of these, the River Hodder, is the only one of the Ribble’s major tributories that never flows through a town.  The Hodder is a totally rural river.

The Darwen, leaving its own town valley flows through Blackburn where it collects the Blakewater.  The Calder, having emerged from the Cliviger Gorge and passed through the beautiful Towneley lands twists its way in 19th-century cobblestone channels between the old mills of Burnley and hidden away near the town centre absorbs the Brun. 

The Hodder, in contrast, never sees anything larger than the scattered villages and hamlets to the south of the Forest of Bowland.  Its upper reaches have long been dammed, creating the Stocks Reservoir above Slaidburn.  From here it flows in twists and turns from east to west past Newton and Dunsop Bridge where it picks up the waters of the River Dunsop and Langden Brook and goes on south past Whitewell, at the back of its famous Inn.

The water then has to turn again, and counterintuitively it now flows from west to east, away from the sea as it searches for a way around Longridge Fell.  Meandering south again between rises in the land it flows under the Higher and Lower Hodder Bridges until near Mitton reaching the Ribble, a river which at this point is in no way its superior.  The Hodder gives up its name, the waters merge and together they flow to the sea.

The Hodder flowing (from the left) into the Ribble near Mitton.
(I must sometime get a shot up the Hodder from the other bank)

This is magnificent walking country, ranging from leisurely strolls by the river bank and higher paths along wooded hillsides to steeper hauls up and over the surrounding moorland,  Centuries-old stone-built houses, ancient bridges, quaint villages, and nearby is splendid Stoneyhurst; these all complement the beauty of the river itself. 

I’ve walked this Bowland (or “Bolland”) country in all kinds of weather: up by the Langden Brook deep in January snow, down from High Hodder Bridge slithering through muddy woodland in July rain, and tramping over the tops from the Trough to the Brennand Valley in September sunshine.  With a friend or walking alone this is Lancashire at its best.

When looking through the December 2009 issue of Country Walking Magazine I was rather surprised to find Burnley, Lancashire, listed among the month’s twenty-six recommended walking routes.  Now before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this is a southerner talking out of the top of his hat about the industrial north and “dark satanic mills”, let me point out that I grew up in Burnley, went to school there, and only left on getting married and moving fifteen miles down the road to Darwen.

The photograph above is copied from the 1909 official guide to Towneley Hall which, along with other publications, has been in my Burnley local history collection for many years – actually I have a 1911 reprint, not the 1909 first printing.

Having grown up in Burnley I think I can claim the right to be balanced and fair about it, without indulging in dishonest flettery.  There are some grotty parts.  I recently went back to the Burnley Wood part of the town and was seriously unimpressed with the condition of the area.  On the other hand there are some wonderful places, and Towneley Hall with its open fields and woodland park stands out among them.  So I should not really have been surprised; it’s just that it’s relatively unusual for the message to have got home to people outside the area.

I had the enormous privilege between the ages of twelve and twenty-one of living on Woodgrove Road  overlooking Towneley Holmes.  It was from this base that in my teens I learned the joy of walking in the countryside, across the valley, up and over the hill to Worsthorne and Hurstwood; along the valley to Walk Mill, Holme and  Cliviger Gorge.  Earlier this year, due to the illness and death of a close relative, I had to spend considerable time in the area and was reintroduced to exploring this wonderful landscape – wonderful, and yet so close to the legacy of 19th century industrialisation and 20th century urban sprawl.

The Country Walking route starts in front of Towneley Hall, takes you high above the town on the moors at Crown Point (where as a 10-year-old in the early 50s I was often to be found with the family Alsatian), down past Dyneley to Walk Mill and back along the valley close to the Calder to the Towneley Hall car park – or more likely the Stables Cafe.

This really is a inspired example of how people living in so many of Lancashire’s industrial towns have always been able to get out quickly into splendid countryside.  Towneley Hall itself warrants a future article of its own.