Rossendale

It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey writeups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at ukbicyclist.weebly.com (along with a couple of long memoires of the Soviet bloc). The website is best viewed in a browser/tablet, not on a mobile.

Rossendale! It sounds like a 25-verse border ballad — Sweet Lass of Rossendale! — with broken hearts and bloody murder amid the moonlit heather. It certainly sounds more romantic than East Lancashire, which is where Rossendale actually is, in the industrialised West Pennines. And it sounds a lot better than Rochdale to Burnley, which is where this ride went.

In May 2018, I did the length of Rossendale, the major towns of which are Bacup and Rawtenstall. The jaunt began, as ever, with a long train ride, from South Yorkshire up to the starting point. It was standing room only. I was squashed up against three elderly American lady tourists and a student, who kept clapping her hands with glee and saying, “Oh, cool!” as the Americans detailed their trip. They were struggling with county names: “Is this one War-cester-shy-er? And this Lay-cester-shy-er? No? Gosh, it’s so confusing!” While trying to track down the ancestral home of one of the three, in Boston (“Boston! Oh cool!”), they’d ended up in Lancashire instead of Lincolnshire. They were nice old dears, though. One of them said to the conductor barging past, “Am I in your way, sir?” When did you last hear anybody call a railway employee “Sir?” I think the Americans have got this right.

It was already nearly lunchtime when I hauled the bike off the train at Rochdale. There can be few towns in England of greater historic interest yet less visitor appeal than this old cotton centre. Getting into the pee-stained lift down to street level was like stepping into a gas chamber, and my first Rochdale resident, a heavily tattooed, middle-aged wreck of a woman, was a beggar waiting at the lift entrance to bum from passengers as they exited holding their noses. No “sir” from her. Still, better than my last visit, when a gang of teenagers hurled abuse in the main square.

Yet Rochdale was once a place of substance, rivalling Manchester: a textile town and centre of agitation against the Corn Laws, and last but not least, birthplace of the now worldwide Cooperative movement. Of this heritage, little remains but a daunting blackened hulk of a town hall, a wasteland of broken old mill buildings and a huge sub-continental population originally invited over in a vain attempt to keep the looms humming by using cheap imported labour. The postwar demise of the mills took decades. Though people think of Pennine towns as being stone-built, and so vested with a monolithic dignity if not always beauty and prosperity, Rochdale is mostly red-brick streets that exude want and demoralisation. It just looks squalid today.

Another of its downsides is one of England’s most confusing town-centre road layouts. Despite using a one-inch map, it took me 90 minutes of twisting and turning to find my B-road north, after doing a 360-degree orbit of the centre.

Rochdale scenes

But the last of the factory sheds and mill chimneys were finally left behind. After the inauspiciously named Falinge Park High School (Aspire! Thrive! Achieve!), the going soon got properly rural. I lucked upon a cycle track through Healey Dell, a nature reserve built along the old Bacup railway line and the rocky, tumbling little River Spodden.

The centrepiece of this linear park is a very tall 8-arch stone viaduct, which proved so troublesome to build (as did the whole line) that they had to scrap the original structure altogether and put up this one 19 metres away. The ostensible reason was that the underpinnings had been insecure, causing slippage, but I much preferred the heritage centre explanation. Which was that the surveyors had screwed up and put the bridge in the wrong place, covering their incompetence up with guff about weak clay foundations.

The rail trail took me about halfway to Bacup, which is pronounced Bake-Up not Back-Up. This was a rather nondescript, stone-built market town, likewise with a history in the cotton trade. Wedged into crevices among the high Pennines, it was a place of sharp climbs and narrow roads, with good views to the moors all around. Like many market towns, its old centre had been reduced to a busy roundabout.

I’d reached Bacup at four in the afternoon, several hours behind schedule now due to getting lost and dawdling. But a long, fine May evening was in the offing, so I kept to the original plan.

Around here began Rossendale proper; in other words, the valley of the upper Irwell, which later becomes one of Manchester’s main rivers. The valley bottom was built-up nearly all the way. Much remained of the old wool and cotton industry, though almost none of it now operational. Here and there, terraces climbed like staircases up steep little side roads that ended abruptly in undergrowth where the gradient became too much. Every few miles, a tall, smoke-blackened chimney or two rose, the long-disused relics of the departed industry. They looked like memorial columns.

The road followed the Irwell. As did the disused railway from Rochdale. It was hard to see the rationale for closing this line, given the congestion of the road, the density of population along it, and the proximity of so many big towns and cities.

Detouring briefly to look for the old station at Stacksteads, just west of Bacup, I stumbled across the day’s most macabre site, a group of industrial ponds called The Lodges. According to a plaque, it was long favoured as a suicide spot, because the water, being of factory origin, was warmer than a cold natural pool. That was one of those little details that, I knew, would stay with me. And it has.

Stacksteads merged into Rawtenstall, a large, straggling old cotton town of similar character to Bacup. Here, though, the railway had been brought back. This was the terminus of the East Lancashire steam line, running back down a parallel valley to Bury. Being a sucker for heritage railways, I sought out the station and am happy to report that they’ve made a splendid job of it — a neat period ensemble of platform, old coaches and ticket hall with an endearingly pompous little clocktower, all in maroon and white livery.

But the station café was closed, so I went back into town for a quiche from Mannings the bakers, who get a special shout-out here not only for supplying a superb meal but also for doing so after they’d covered over all their stock at closing and were already going home. I can think of no other English county where they would have done this. I’ve always found Lancashire, where shop staff always say hello and goodbye to customers and B&B landladies thank you for staying, a uniquely hospitable place.

Then, to wash the quiche down, I had a coffee at Britain’s last original temperance bar. This was the other find of the day. I’d never heard of it, and indeed wasn’t aware that England had any temperance establishments left. You see the faded words “Temperance Hotel” on turn-of-the-century buildings all over the country; for a few decades every town had a thriving temperance “scene,” until the stifling Victorian morality that underpinned it faded and the cinema and other entertainments lured its devotees away.

I’d always wondered what a bar without booze was actually like. Well, here was the answer: it was full of colourful bottles of fruit cordials and milk-shake drinks lining the walls like standing wines in a cellar, made by a local company called Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose name the bar bears, and whose website tells me that the temperance movement began in Preston as early as 1835 in response to the tendency of life in the cotton mills to drive people to drink. Today’s café was run by a cheery young couple, who told me the business was a continuation rather than a revival. They’d revamped the interior in retro style, using the original shelving.

With a lineup of fruit, herb and flower-based cordials — using ginger, cranberry, burdock, hibiscus and such like – this seemed to me an idea that could catch on, especially given the high Muslim populations in many of these old industrial towns. “Yes, we’ve been on Radio 4,” the girl said. “And we do get Muslims; they say it’s better than Costa.” But for the impracticality of cycling with heavy glass bottles, I would have bought a batch of Mr. Fitzpatrick’s finest myself. Some of those cordials looked ideal with a double vodka.

As Bacup had merged into Rawtenstall, so Rawtenstall slowly turned into Haslingden, which was another old cotton town spilling up several hillsides, but with feel of an overgrown Victorian industrial village. It too had a curiosity: according a blue plaque on a health centre, this was where the first-ever written intelligence tests were attempted competitively, at the Wesleyan School on December 13, 1901, under the direction of William Mather MP, “who donated £10 in prize money.” Despite a good bit of online searching, I could not find out how this prototype IQ test actually worked.

So far I’d managed to stay off the worst of the main roads by following the side lanes and bits of cycle route where I could find them, but this became harder on the next leg to Accrington, where I was stuck with the A680.

Accrington is one of those northern towns known only as a (now defunct) football club, the perennially skint but memorably named Accrington Stanley, many of whose original members lived on Stanley Street. But it proved a large and imposing member of the chain of textile towns, with a hillside country park, fine stone-built streets and some really good architecture, notably the palatial classical market hall with its successions of Romanesque windows. A long railway viaduct striding mightily across the centre over streets and rooftops added a note of worldly importance.

Evening was setting in now, so I hurried on to Burnley. Now came a final few miles of busy A-roads and big, difficult junctions, taking me through drably industrialised plateau country through to Burnley’s main station, the end-point.

Where bad news awaited. Plagued by crew shortages — this problem never seems to go away despite the 50-grand salaries — Northern had cancelled a whole swathe of evening services, and nothing was coming in or leaving for the foreseeable. The station was manned by a bald, thickset and heavily tattooed gent called Ron who looked like a bouncer and wasn’t exactly overflowing with either information or sympathy. He glowered at every passenger who tiptoed up with a query, and spoke in surly monosyllables. “Nowt’s moved on ma line since half four,” he said as he wearily opened the update page on his computer one more time, “and ah’ve got no news.”

“Well, what do you know?”

“Says here there’s a Leeds train coming in in 45 minutes. It’s at Preston now.”

“Is it being held or is it moving?”

“Dunno, mate.”

“When will we know?”

“Dunno.”

I had a dilemma now. It looked like I might be spending the night in a Burnley hotel, and it might be hard to find a room now. But if I left the station, I could miss the rumoured Leeds train. I hung around.

Eventually Ron told us — a dozen of us were stranded — that “ma train” had indeed left Preston. I was afraid it would be packed, as it was the first service through Burnley in about four hours. But it was only half-full.

The guard said that the underlying problem was new timetabling, which was proving a challenge for everybody, though it didn’t explain the absenteeism. Since the ratbags had been on strike the week before, and hardly ever manage to offer a fully reliable service, I had little sympathy. Northern were just leaving their customers stranded at stations. They weren’t even keeping them informed. Still, it was a nice train ride back, along the steep-sided, sylvan Calder Valley in all its spring finery.

More like this can be found at my website Riding the Shires.

I’m fine with being quoted (up to two paragraphs), but all rights @joeslater.