A short while ago there was a discussion online about ancestral memory, whether we have inexplicable feelings of belonging when we visit a place that has links to our ancestors. I’m not sure if it is an ancestral memory of some kind, but Dean Clough in Great Harwood is somewhere to which I do feel drawn and on days like today the beauty of it can nearly make me weep.
During the lockdowns in the pandemic Dean Clough became ‘the’ place for many in the town for their daily walk, and I was always amazed by the very many people who had lived in the town for years and yet for whom the area was a total surprise. Every day there were new photos on social media, at all times of day and in all weather.
As a child my parents took me on walks over the Nab and up to the pines (which were little baby pines all those years ago…) so I am familiar with the area, but little did I know how much my family history is embedded into the farms and cottages, many of which are now gone. When I began to research my roots it wasn’t long before I found links to the many farms that dotted the area, before they were abandoned after the reservoir was built in the late nineteenth century.
The Smalleys were tenants of Smalley Thorn, Fearley Hey and Smithy Cote, all now gone since the reservoir was built. The Walmsleys were at Bostons, which is where my 2nd great grandfather was born, his mother being a Walmsley from Bostons. Richard Walmsley and his wife Elizabeth were living at Riley Hey in later life. Richard’s mother was a Clayton, which is probably why his two older brothers were born at Bowley, the Clayton farms now also demolished.
It does make me wonder how far back my roots in this particular area of the town might go. Although a lot of the land in Dean Clough was moor and waste until the eighteenth century, parts of it were ‘anciently enclosed’, and there are documents from the early fourteenth century excluding certain acres on the moor from ‘intercommoning’ by Billington and Great Harwood. These were Roulegh Clough (Riley Hey), Fayrehurst (Fearly Hey) and Whitekar. So people were agriculturally active in the area, but I may never know how far back my roots here lie because documents for anyone except the landowning elite are sparse before the eighteenth century.
I often wonder how my Calvert ancestors felt on leaving Laneside, but they were probably very happy by then to abandon what would seem a very poor cottage for a nice, new terraced house in the town.
There are a lot of things to add to the site, not least a page about Dean Clough, the farms and families who farmed there, but today I thought this sunny Great Harwood day, with hawthorn in full bloom, was worth sharing for my first blog.