Pennystone Rock and Drowned Villages

An email came in today from John Hitchon:

"Hi John.
As a sandgrown'n myself I have found your website very interesting, thinking about it there is a lot more to Blackpool than meets the eye, its history for instance.

I have lived here now for over 47 years and I too have seen many changes in the surrounding areas of the Fylde coast. When I was as school which was many moons ago, we had to choose a subject of interest to which I chose the history of Blackpool. The only thing was I would have loved to find out more about the history of Singleton Thorpe and that of Pennystone Rock, but as having made searches through numerous libraries I failed to find anything about it really.

So what I would like to ask you is if you can shine any light on the history of them ?"

There's not a great deal of hard fact known about Singleton Thorpe I think - here's what I've read in various books, web sites and so on. Some of it may be true, some of it may be a bit suspect but it makes a good story anyway! Singleton Thorpe was one of several villages overcome in the great flood of 1555 when the sea surged inland, almost to the line of the M6 motorway, so one version has it.

It was the end of the Forest of Amounderness, as the sea snapped oaks like twigs and farmers still turn them up in fields sometimes. The sea never retreated as far as it had started from and from then on (probably from before then) erosions steadily took parts of the Fylde coast every year. Singleton Thorpe was supposed to be about a mile and a bit further out from Thornton Cleveleys, although I've also seen it that it was off Bispham a mile from Pennystone Rock out to sea. Catherine Rothwell's web page (no longer online) has an account of an expedition looking for the remains of the village in 1893. They found a solitary cottage, which may suggest they were looking in the wrong place. There are plenty of tree stumps to be found off Cleveleys at a very low tide.

By the time the cliffs at Bispham were concreted over to protect them, they were falling at the rate of tens of feet per year. Just what shape England may have been in 1555 is likely to remain a mystery! Pennystone Rock was supposed to be close by a public house and had an iron ring fastened to it for horses to be hitched to whilst their owners had a drink. This is mentioned in "The Story of Blackpool", though the authors of that book couldn't confirm the existence of the ring.

I've never managed to reach Pennystone Rock, though I do have a photo of Carlin Rock with Bispham, well...Norbreck, in the background (shown above), and yet I still couldn't get to it because of a deeper channel of water. Pennystone Rock is about a half mile further out than Carlin I think. I freely admit to being less than an expert on this (who wants to be an expert anyway - an 'ex' is a has-been and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure!) so if anyone knows any more, drop me an email or add a comment to this blog entry!

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