A
SHORT HISTORY OF RIVINGTON
By
W.M Fergusson
Introduction
Rivington is an
oasis in a desert of rapidly blackening country. The encircling names of
industry are fast licking up all the green and tender things of life, leaving
only an arid waste of cinder heaps. The curves of the oak and beech have given
way to the straight chimney-shaft, while the farmstead with its quaint gables
has been levelled to find space for gaunt factory walls. But at the borders of
Rivington all this is stayed. A city
thirty miles away must have water free from taint, and so a wide tract of
hillside is chosen, and an invisible barrier encircles it, through which no
factory may penetrate.
Within this oasis
stands the Pike, and behind it the still higher crest of Winter hill. Sitting
there on a summer day, amid the drowsy hum of the bees, while the call of the
moor-cock floats across the heather, it is difficult to believe that below in
the plains on the right hand and on the left the great shuttle is clattering to
and fro in the roaring loom of life.
To the south lies
Horwich with its vast engine-works, while to the north are Chorley and Preston,
the mills of
But a beautiful
oasis, peopled only by the bees and the
grouse or at best by a few shepherds, would have been of little service to the
great mass of dwellers in the surrounding towns; and as year by year access to
fields and moorland became more restricted, the time seemed near when the green
oasis would only be a picture to be gazed at from afar. It was then that Mr. W.
H. Lever acquired the Rivington Estate and decided to set aside the rich meadow
lands of the lower slopes as well as the crest of the hill, to be given to the
people of
The extent of this splendid gift will be seen from the map at the
beginning of this book, and when the unique character of the upper portion of
the land, including the summit of the Pike itself, is considered, it may
probably be said without fear of contradiction that as a public park Lever had
few rivals in
How many centuries
ago this spot was first seized on by man as a shelter from his enemies in the
encircling forest can never be told, but all about us lie traces of remote
antiquity. On the surrounding moors are many relics of the early days when,
Paynim amid their circles, and the stones they pitch up straight to heaven our
forefathers worshipped the sun and moon. At Noon Hill is still to be seen a
tumulus,1 which in prehistoric times may
The Beacon, built in 1733 as the inscription
states, no doubt took the place of an earlier structure, and it is not
improbable that the " Standing Stone," mentioned in the charter quoted
on page 8, may have actually occupied this spot. Down below, on the edge of the
lake, rises a hillock, now partly covered with trees, known as Coblowe, which
may have been an early burial-mound. The word low, from the old English
hlaw, meaning a hill, when used in place-names almost invariably points
to a barrow or prehistoric burial-place.
The name Street, too, as stated later on, takes
one's mind back to remote times, nearly two thousand years ago, when the Romans
occupied