DARWEN BRIDGE AND WALTON-LE-DALE.
BAMBER BRIDGE
Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills. Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge, rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in 1366 and rebuilt in 1752.
PARSON WOODS, OF CHOWBENT
Walton-le-Dale, the village on the right, looks a peaceable place enough, and it has little history, but it came very near being the scene of a bloodstained struggle between Catholics and Presbyterians in the Old Pretender’s rising of 1715. Nearly the whole of the Catholic gentry of Lancashire had turned out to aid the Pretender’s forces, and the rebellion was almost on the point of changing from a dynastic conflict and a clash between Whig and Tory ideals into the very much more serious matter of a religious war. The rising of the Tories and the Catholics stirred to furious antagonism the Whigs and the Low Churchmen, but most of them blew off their rage in violent language. Not so the valiant Boanerges of the dissenting chapel of Chowbent, near Bolton, who not only breathed fire and slaughter, but took the lead of eighty among his congregation, whom he marched off to the front; the front being the passage of the Ribble, over against Preston. There the embattled minister—this valiant Parson Woods, “General Woods” as they called him—posted his men to withstand the crossing of the river, and was said to have drawn his sword and sworn he would run through the body the first man who showed signs of timidity. Having arrived there, armed only with what Baines, the Lancashire historian, calls “implements of husbandry”—what a beautiful phrase, covering the ungainliness of the poor crooked scythe and spade!—in front of a strong force of rebels, armed with implements of war, they doubtless were timid; but the bold advance of General Wills saved the situation, and Parson Woods had no excuse to embrue his hands in gore. But King George the First, recognising his earnestness, sent a gratuity of £100, which Woods promptly divided among his men; they in their turn handing it over towards rebuilding their chapel.
For the rest, there remains but to remark upon this singular epitaph, dated 1685, in Walton-le-Dale church, before we have over the bridge into Preston:
“Here lyeth the body of a pure virgin, espoused to the man Xt Jesus, Mrs. Cordelia Hoghton, whose honorable descent you know. Know now her ascent.”
XIII
Crossing the Ribble and looking backwards, the view along the dale to where Walton stands is charming; but with the extraordinary expansion of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, and the building here of many new mills, it seems like to be an expiring charm of scenery. Already the mills have come across from the north to the south bank of the river.