Oh I Do Like
Oh I do like to be beside the seaside.
Blackpool, is pilloried by metropolitan journalists as being full of stag and hen parties. People living on social security benefits, in former holiday flats, in council wards that are at the top of league tables for ‘deprivation’. It’s an easy target for sobbery.
It’s also the capital of ‘popular culture’. You know, end of the pier shows and light entertainment. There was a time when to get a Saturday night show on television you’d have needed to have done a summer season on one of Blackpool’s piers. Morecambe and Wise, Cannon and Ball etc etc. Things have now turned full circle and contestants on Saturday night TV show ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ strive to get to Blackpool and dance in the Tower Ballroom.
Meanwhile major stars have all wanted to have concerts in the town, and / or record albums connected to it. Frank Sinatra released ‘Live at Blackpool’ 26th July 1953, The Stone Roses ‘Live: Blackpool Empress Ballroom’ 12th August 1989, and The White Stripes DVD of their concert ‘Under Blackpool Lights’ 27th and 28th January 2004.
Ian Brown of the Stone Roses has been quoted as saying “It’s not where you’re from that matters, but where you’re at.”
Well, maybe I’m both. I’m from Blackpool. And maybe Blackpool represents where I’m at.
There’s something for everyone, it’s aim is to entertain, cheer you up. It doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. High culture (Grundy Art Gallery), party time culture (Tower Lounge). There are grade one listed buildings, there is contemporary sculpture on the promenade. Maybe I’m part of the landscape, and the landscape is part of me.
‘Where you’re at’ maybe be cool way of referencing where you attitude to life lies, but we can’t escape where we’re from, and where our relations are from. It grounds us, it’s part of our heritage, a historic backstory that lives on through us. Looking at a family tree is one thing, but seeing a place walked on by our forbears is another.
Places have heritage as well, not just London with it’s tower, or Hastings with it’s famous battle. But places like Blackpool have a history before neon lights and kiss me quick hats.
Evidence of early human activity has been found in and around Blackpool, in 1970 the 12,000 year old skeleton of the ‘Poulton Elk’ was discovered along with barbed arrowheads near Blackpool Sixth Form College. This provided evidence of humans living in the area as far back as the Palaeolithic period - the old stone age (Well before Stone Roses were found in Blackpool). There have also been finds of Neolithic stone axes, Neolithic coracles and wooden causeways.
I started to research the local history during late April and early May 2020. Lockdown had prevented significant travel, but ‘daily exercise’ was permitted so I thought I’d go for a walk. Looking at a map it was evident there were numerous permitted footpaths through the farmland surrounding Blackpool, the map even showed the line of a previous Roman road.
Off I went, with sandwiches, bottle of orange squash and camera in hand. It was a warm spring day, with dusty paths and spring crops starting to germinate in the fields.
Throughout the medieval period Blackpool was a coastal hamlet in Amounderness. Biscopham (Bispham) features in the Domesday book (as does Saxon named Laton - a prehistoric stone hammer from what we know call Layton is apparently in the Grundy Art Gallery Collection). In 1326 the spelling was Byspham and along with Poulton it was one of the two main populated areas on the Fylde. It was in Bispham that the first mention of "Blackpool" appeared, found in the Register of Bispham Parish Church in 1602 with the christening record of a child born on 22 September to a couple who lived "on the bank of the Black Pool”.
During this period the Fylde and area around Blackpool included extensive marshland and numerous small streams and rivers. Spen Dyke flowed out to sea at Milner Pool near what is now the The Manchester pub (Popular with Stag and Hens), and there was a stream alongside All Hallows Road in Bispham. Skipool Creek had an inlet, Main Dyke, which flowed from Marton Mere and the area near Blackpool Zoo.
In 1731 and 1741 the size of Marton Mere was drastically reduced by the cutting / enlargement of Main Dyke north of Mythop, by Edward Jolly and later William Jolly. This drainage still benefits the area today. My Great Grandfather was Alfred Jolly, as far as I can ascertain I’m related to those who drained the land around Blackpool.
In 1781 visitors to Blackpool were able to use a new private road, built by Thomas Clifton and Sir Henry Hoghton. Stagecoaches began running to Blackpool from Manchester in the same year, and from Halifax in 1782. Blackpool rose to prominence as a major centre of tourism in England when a railway was built in the 1840s connecting it to the industrialised regions of Northern England. In 1975 the M55 Motorway was opened.
On the walk from Kirkham I strode passed the motorway embankment, and crossed the railway at ‘Crossings Wood’. My feet had covered the ground drained by my Jolly relative in the early 1700s, past the embankment built for the 1975 motorway, and across the railway line at a copse of trees that may have been named in 1840.
My initial walk was 10 miles, and it triggered my interest in the local history and the discovery of much of what you’ve just read. A couple of weeks later I undertook another pedestrian wander of 20 miles. This time from Garstang in to Blackpool. I walked beside ‘Crawley’s Dyke’ seemingly named after the person who drained that area of marshland, near the area where stone axes were found, past Grand Agnes Wood and Bone Hill. All places I’ve been past in the car or by bicycle numerous times. But I didn’t know the place names until I’d planned my route, nor did I realize that Bone Hill was indeed a ‘hill’ in relation to the drained marsh.
Travelling by foot around an area undoubtedly gives great understanding of, and alters your perception of, time; space; distance; environment and landscape. Local becomes a half day round trip by foot, remote is more than a day away by foot, what was once inaccessible marshland has now become a walkable track.
Travelling from Nateby across the Fylde in Neolithic times required a wooden causeway. Only a few hundred years ago Lancaster, Preston, Ribchester, Manchester or York would have been remote. Blackpool was once a remote place given a line in a church record book.
Now it is possible to have a Zoom conference call from Blackpool featuring people in New York and Sydney. Modern technology and transport links have altered our perception of remote.
Think of Blackpool’s Golden Miles and your minds eye conjures up the sandy beach, but the real golden miles are the hinterland that holds the history. Much of our landscape was moulded by our forebears, and when we’re feeling lost, or lonely, or locked down by whatever life has thrown at us maybe a walk in it is what helps. To sense the landscape and it’s past under our feet, and our human heritage around us. The Stoics had the concept of ‘pneuma’ or ‘breath of life’, which in its highest form constitutes the human soul. Going for a walk, or moving slowly through a local landscape, maybe gives us an opportunity to reconnect with our soul, where we’re from, and help us to get to where we’re at.
Henry Iddon
@henryiddon
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