A Few Curiosities

I like to find things that are a little out of the ordinary (and haven't all that far to look, let's face it...) So a quick collection of a few bits that have been going through the scanner in the last week or two.

Starting close to home, this is a view of Carlin Rock which is about half a mile off the sea wall at Bispham where I live. Only visible at low tide and shrinking because of the wearing effect of two tides a day and probably sinking into the sand as well. Even further out to sea is Pennystone Rock. Only uncovered at extremely low tides, it's said the stone used to sit outside an old inn and that there was an iron ring set in it for tethering horses.

I think I blogged about the God Stone of Formby after a more recent visit in 2007, but this photo was taken in July 1983 when I first went looking for it after reading about it in the excellent King's England series of books by Arthur Mee in the volume about Lancashire. Lancashire was a slightly larger place in the days of those books! It can be found in the churchyard and is said to pre-date the church, being a pagan stone that locals carried their dead around 3 times. The early Christians carved steps and a cross and a circle representing Heaven to show that the way to Heaven was through the cross.

A slightly more modern relic, but a reminder of a way of life now vanished none-the-less. Sheds of the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway at Haworth in Yorkshire. A couple of steam locomotives are in steam, ready for the day's work on this museum line.

And finally, a view across the River Wharf of Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, taken later on the same day as the Haworth photo in July 1983. The ruins of the abbey are impressive and the scenery of this beautiful spot makes them all the more so. The line of stepping stones had disappeared the last time I was there. I hope that was temporary and not a modern health & safety nonsense.

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Have I Mentioned the Weather?

Cor! Snow is normally an event in Blackpool. Just every now and then we get some. I used to reckon about every six years but we had some last year around the end of November and this year the entire country seems to be under a layer of the white stuff.

It's the temperatures that have gone with this lot that has been the eye-opener!

Last night we took Mum out for a meal with Gill and Eddie and had a great night at the Red Lion in Bispham.

We were already standing and putting coats on when the carol singers arrived but I don't think they minded as I assured them as we walked past that we hadn't heard them before...!

We took Mum back home and the car registered -14°C on the display. Brrrr! No comments about yellow snow thank you... it's the artificial light!

First Gig with New Keyboard

We played a charity gig in aid of Sports Relief last night at Bispham Conservative Club arranged by the ladies from Sainsburys store next door. They raised over two thousand pounds for the charity altogether so a tremendous effort.

We did a couple of spots, starting and finishing the evening and there was a performance by Britain's Got Talent contestant Tom McLeod.

The new keyboard sounded good, but I'm still not totally familiar with it yet and there was a moment's panic when I couldn't find an entire folder of rock and roll songs. It took a while before I realised there were too many folders to show on one page and there was a page 2 button lit up! Duh!

Anyway we got everyone up dancing, which we were told was a most unusual feat!

Carrying all the gear down a very steep fire escape in the dark was a bit hairy!

Today in Blackpool

"We're doing a charity walk", Fran said. "What???" "It's only a mile..." she added hastily. Ah, well that's not so bad perhaps!

Mind you, walking for a mile along the cliffs at Bispham, north Blackpool is akin to walking ten anywhere else. Utter the words, "We've had fifty miles per hour gales!" to anyone from Blackpool and they'll look at you in contempt and say "That's not a bloody gale!" So off we went to find all Fran's mates from work. They had either all sensibly stuck a wet finger in the air and decided to stay at home or Fran got the wrong message about meeting place, time or day.

"Let's just go for a walk on our own then," I suggested as the wind whipped tears out of my eyes to the extent they were dripping off my chin onto my coat. So we walked from Red Bank Road (where the illuminations finish at Bispham) down to the Gynn (the roundabout on the Promenade road) and back. This is about 2 and a half miles altogether perhaps, half of it done at the trot with the wind behind us and the return with us leaning forwards at an angle of 45 degrees, enjoying the sudden but thankfully brief downpour. All along the way there were little groups of men in high visibility jackets working on the tram tracks. Given that Easter is next weekend I can with confidence say there's no chance of seeing a tram in Blackpool unless you nip up to the tram shed. They do seem to be getting on with it though.

From the cliffs we also had a good view of the stricken ferry, Riverdance, that as every Blackpool resident predicted, has stubbornly refused every attempt to re-float her and has now rolled over to an angle of 110 degrees and is busily engaged in burying her head in the sand a few more inches every day. Several weeks of being battered by the hefty winter seas as the tide comes in twice a day have had their toll and the structure of the ship is starting to get damaged. So presumably now they will start to draw up plans for dismantling her and hope to keep any leakage of oils and fuels to a minimum. Not an easy task I should imagine. It will be easier though to keep contamination down whilst it is above the sand than it would be if it sank down much further! Every time the tide comes in it washes sand away from around the hull, letting the ship settle a bit more then filling the gaps back up with sand.

Talking of disasters... Down at Uncle Tom's Cabin the long disused boating pool which had had some recent use as a go-kart track now looks even more attractive. Yes, this'll bring the families back... You know, with all the hotels and the council bemoaning the fact that families don't come to Blackpool any more you only have to look around and wonder what they would find to do that doesn't cost money. Yes we have one of the best beaches in the country, but when I think of all the things I loved to do as a kid, once away from the beach, pushing my toy yacht around a boating pool came high on the list. All that new expanse of tarmac on the new Promenade - I'm sure they could have included a paddling pool and a model boating pond.

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A Good Night

Last night I was looking forward to an uncomplicated night and a meal of sausage egg and chips. I thought I might push the boat out and shake a dollop of brown fruity sauce onto the bangers but then when Fran got home from work she decided I was going to take her out for a meal instead.

"But there's nowhere I know of that does sausage egg and chips that'll be open at that time..." I said, plaintively.
"You'll have to take me for something else then, won't you?" was the response.

So we left the car wondering what it had done to offend us and walked - sorry let's give that some emphasis - walked to the local Beefeater which is called the Red Lion.

There is nothing remotely historic looking about the Red Lion, though regular readers may recall me mentioning it as being the place where the crew of the shipwrecked Abana were taken to after being rescued in 1894.

Anyway, these days they do less of the peering from the doorway with a burning lantern in case the lifeboat comes back their way and more of the relaxed dining with what we in Lancashire might call a gradely-slab-of-cow-on-a-plate.

We had fillet steak and a bottle of merlot to go with it. Then we happily set off to walk/sway home, whoops, it's over that-a-way, feeling full, a little tipsy, giddy and full of bonhomie! Grand as owt! The Red Lion is just past the Bispham roundabout on the road towards Cleveleys. I didn't take any photos so you get one of the aftermath...

Blackpool Tram Track Repairs

The Promenade up at Bispham looks strangely bleak without the tram tracks.

At this stage of the work to re-lay the tracks it is probably looking its worst as the excavations have been carried out, the old tracks taken up and what is left is a large hole along the fenced-in length of the tracks that is muddy and waterlogged.

But as work continues we can look forward to a tram service that might not sway as much as it used to! The tramway is due to re-open for Easter 2008.

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Gynn Square Trams

This postcard shows trams turning from the Promenade into Dickson Road at Gynn Square Blackpool. The route, to Blackpool North Station closed on 27 October 1963 and there is no trace of rails left anywhere along the route today.

At the same time the tram sheds at Bispham were closed along with the route to it down Red Bank Road. For another twenty years or so the rails to the sheds were visible in the car park of Alpic, a cash and carry that opened in the old sheds. Today the sheds have gone and the car park now serves a building on Red Bank Road itself - the Sainsburys store.

This being a John Hinde postcard (taken by John Hinde himself) it has several examples of the painted red coats, I mentioned in an earlier post! At time of writing the Gynn gardens are still there and have a colony of rabbits which can be seen quite often munching the grass and flowers!

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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