A considerable portion of the hundred is as yet untainted with the smoke of the manufactory. Many of the parish churches are of great antiquity; amongst them may be named Ormskirk, Leigh, Wigan, Winwick, Warrington, Childwall, Walton–on–the–Hill, Prescot, Sephton and Huyton. Burscough Priory was in the parish of Ormskirk, and Liverpool had its ancient castle.
Having thus briefly (but at as great a length and in as much detail as the nature and scope of the series of County Histories will allow) described the County Palatine, we may at once proceed to deal with its history as a not unimportant section of the United Kingdom.
CHAPTER II.
PRE–ROMAN LANCASHIRE.
Notwithstanding what has been written upon the so–called “glacial nightmare,” it still remains an undisputed fact that at some far–distant period the whole of Lancashire was sunk beneath a sea, the waters of which carried along with them huge masses of ice, which, in their passage southward, deposited boulders which they had borne in their chill embrace for hundreds of miles. The hills which rose above the sea were covered with perpetual snow, and the valleys between them were filled with glaciers, which in many instances left a terminal moraine.
The direction which these icebergs took was invariably from north–west to south–east, or north–north–west to south–south–east, that being sufficiently indicated by the polished and striated rocks frequently discovered in all parts of the county. A careful investigation of the erratic blocks which have been discovered in one small district alone[1] shows nearly 400 of these rocks, some of which have travelled from Scotland, but by far the larger number have come from the Lake District; these are occasionally found in the valleys, but are generally located on the sides and tops of hills at an elevation of from 600 to 1,200 feet above the sea–level. Geology furnishes abundant proofs that at this period the level of the land in what is now known as Lancashire was fifty or sixty feet higher than it is at the present day; this is very apparent along the coast–line, where the remains of submarine forests are frequently met with. It is more than probable that, from the mouth of the Mersey to the estuary of the Dudden, what are now sand banks were in prehistoric times dry land on which grew forests of the oak, the birch, the ash, the yew, and Scotch firs.
All along the coast–line from Liverpool to Preston have been found at low water the roots and trunks of trees.
Near Fleetwood and Blackpool frequent traces of these forests have been met with below the high–tide level, the trunks of the trees all pointing eastward, with their torn–up roots to the west; stumps of Scotch firs were found near Rossall, and near to them the cones which had fallen from their branches; trunks of oak and yew trees were also discovered at Martin Mere (in Poulton).