It is as a port that Preston has recently claimed attention. The changes effected since the passing of the Ribble Navigation Act in 1883 have been striking. The marsh which kept the town apart from its river has been drained, and made fit for houses and streets. Woods that were familiar objects in the immediate landscape have disappeared, and the deepening of the channel of the tidal Ribble to admit ships of 1,700 tons has been but a natural result of Arkwright and his spinning-frame, and the cotton industry that superseded the linen-making of the previous century. The new dock, opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1892, with the Corporation as its owners, cost a million of money. The scheme made it necessary to divert the course of the Ribble below the town, and the prediction of the eminent engineer, Sir John Coode, that there would be no port in the country with so free a run to the sea, has been fulfilled. Even with the construction of docks, involving three miles’ length of permanent railway sidings, the old charm of the scene is not entirely lost. The brawny shoulders of Longridge Fell may be discerned in the north-east; cattle and sheep graze on the levels; the borders of the Fylde country are in view, and abrupt Rivington Pike is on the remote horizon.
Between the estuary of the Ribble and the south-eastern boundary of Lancaster Bay is the fertile Fylde district, the conformation of which is, roughly speaking, that of a foreshortened peninsula. The Margate and Ramsgate of Lancashire—if Lytham and Blackpool may be so-called—are on the outlying coast, but they are only of interest to us at the present moment from the arrival of the river WYRE at Fleetwood. This is a seaport and military station of what may, without offence, be termed upstart growth. It is but twenty-one miles north of Preston as the railway flies, and it has the double advantage of being a port and a watering-place. Within the memory of persons who heard about the coronation of Queen Victoria, the place where this important harbour is now situated, with its lighthouse ninety feet high and showing a glare that is visible for thirteen miles at sea, was a mere rabbit-warren, its one adornment a dilapidated limekiln. Its population now must be close upon 10,000, and from its docks lines of steamers ply to and from Belfast and the Isle of Man.
WINDERMERE (p. [291]).
The river Wyre, rising near Brennand Fells, on the western side of the Bowland Forest of which previous mention has been made, takes in as a small tributary another river Calder, which rises on Bleasdale Moor, forming part of a ridge of country often exceeding 1,700 feet above sea-level. Wyresdale is noted for its striking combinations of wild and motley fells in recurring variations, alternating with copse and woodland. One of the earliest ecclesiastical sites in Lancashire is St. Michael’s, some miles below Garstang; and, at a point where the river nears the estuary, the Wyre for several miles is protected from the strength of its own current by a series of artificial banks. The old fashioned town of Poulton-le-Fylde overlooks the river where it expands into the salt expanse of Wyre Water, and the estuary, contrary to the usual custom, after broadening out considerably, contracts somewhat sharply at the mouth, at the western point of which is Fleetwood.
Our next river has been characterised by “Faërie Queene” Spenser as
“the stony, shallow Lone,
That to old Loncaster his name doth lend.”