Littleborough in Lancashire

The so-called Roman Road on Blackstone Edge near Littleborough.
Photo by Humphrey Bolton

Let's follow John and Mary Ward, as they leave Walton le Dale in the 1870s and move to Littleborough, close to the Lancashire border with West Yorkshire. How different they must have found this village in the hilly, sheep-grazing moorlands of the Pennines, to the flat farmland and market gardens around Walton le Dale, where they had both spent most of their lives.

Like Walton le Dale, Littleborough had been a quiet village until the 19th century. It was on a trade route that crossed the Pennines into Yorkshire, with the remains of an ancient road (once thought to be from Roman times) still visible in places on the moorland of Blackstone Edge. The main industry in the 18th century was woollen milling and weaving. Wool "pieces", woven on handlooms in people's homes in Littleborough and the nearby hamlets of Calderbrook, Smithybridge, and Summit, would be carried over the hills to the Piece Hall in Halifax, in Yorkshire, for sale.

Map of Littleborough and surrounds
from Vision of Britain 

Littleborough remained an important link in several trade routes as the industrial revolution got underway. In the early 1800s,  the Rochdale Canal, linking Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire with Manchester in Lancashire, was completed. Littleborough became the site of one of the locks along the canal. A large reservoir, Hollingworth Lake, was constructed nearby to feed water into the canal, and this became something of a tourist attraction over time.

Hollingworth Lake
Own photo

In 1839 the first section of the new Manchester to Leeds railway was built as far as Littleborough. It was extended to Leeds by 1841. Soon the home-based woollen weavers were replaced by steam-powered mills and factories. By the late 1870s, when my great grandparents John and Mary Ann Ward moved to Littleborough, there were numerous cotton and woollen mills in the area, along with associated industries such as bleaching and dyeing, and the population was growing. By 1879 there were nine schools, many of them denominational, with over 1000 students between them.

I still have no clear idea why John and Mary Ann decided to move their family from Walton le Dale sometime between the birth of their fifth child, Edward, in 1874 and their sixth, Mary Ann, in 1877. Was it something to do with the depression in the cotton industry around Preston in the mid 1870's, the result of disputes between the employers and the operatives? Perhaps Littleborough was faring better economically.

Or could they have been trying to remove their family from the smallpox epidemic which struck Preston and surrounding areas in 1876? When she was three years old, Mary Ann had lost two older brothers in the same week, during what was probably an epidemic. She may have been keen to move her young family to a healthier place. Sadly, if that was their reason for moving, it was in vain. Their infant daughter Mary Ann and their seven-year-old son Richard died within days of each other in April 1879, probably from some type of infectious illness. They were buried in the graveyard near the church of St James, Calderbrook, just north of Littleborough.

This was close to where John and Mary Ann and their family were living. In the 1879 MacDonald's Directory, John was listed as a clogger, living in Caldermoor.  The 1881 census records their address as Crabtree Street (no longer in existence). John was just one of at least fifteen cloggers and bootmakers listed in the MacDonalds Directory who were living in the Littleborough area at the time.

Moving on again

John and Mary Ann had three further children born to them in Littleborough, after the deaths of Richard and baby Mary Ann - Fanny (1879), Thomas Henry (my grandfather, in 1882) and Henrietta in 1886. But Littleborough wouldn't remain their home for decades, as Walton le Dale had been for previous generations of the Wards. Sometime after Henrietta's birth they moved to Rastrick in Yorkshire, where they stayed only a short time, then settled in Milnrow, on the other side of Hollingworth Lake.

Again, there's nothing to indicate why they moved. John's widowed brother, Richard, married Elizabeth Clarkson, one of John and Mary's neighbours from Crabtree Street, in 1886. John was one of the witnesses at the wedding, so it seems unlikely this caused any sort of family conflict. Perhaps there simply wasn't enough work in Littleborough for so many cloggers. John and Mary's eldest son, John Willy, had most likely become a clogger and bootmaker by this time, since that was his profession in 1891.

Old mill by the Rochdale Canal, Littleborough
Photo by Tim Green from Bradford

By a series of co-incidences, my husband and I lived just outside Littleborough for a while in the 1980s, By then, the mills were no longer operating and many stood derelict, but it was still a thriving small town. We had no idea then that my father's family had ever lived there, although I was aware of their association with Milnrow.

As I've described before, one of our daughters was baptised in the same church as her great grandfather, Thomas Henry, even though we didn't realise it at the time. Hollingworth Lake was one of our favourite spots for Sunday afternoon walks, and the tow-path along the canal was the easiest and most pleasant way to push a pram to the shops.