New Scanner Arrives

Phew! I can now start scanning again as my new scanner has arrived.

I wasn't actually sure that it was the scanner when it arrived - the box was big enough to hold at least half a dozen...

But after digging through all the shredded cardboard packaging inside I only found one box!

It's a Cannon 9000F flatbed and film scanner all in one, so I've been able to replace two separate scanners with just the one. Meant I had to tidy up my desk... duh!

So now I can scan not only my 35mm negatives and slides but the 120 roll film ones as well. And (pauses to let you get a bit excited) Miss Jeannie has given me a box of her father's 120 negatives showing Blackpool properties from the 1960s.

I might work my way slowly through those and take some photos from the same places for comparison with today! But of course I did have to have a go to see if it worked, so to compare yesterday's shots of Marsh Mill, Thornton, with the same place before the craft village was built, here's a shot from 1983/84.

Oh yes! It works!

Breakfast and a Windmill

Yes, you don't often see the two words "breakfast" and "windmill" together, but there you go...!

Saturday started with a celebration.

Miss Franny has finished work in order to be able to look after our granddaughter, Grace, once Gill goes back to work. So the day after the slightly tearful goodbye at Sainsbugs - it was more the rest of the staff than Fran I think - we met up with Eddie and Gill and David and Jeannie for breakfast at Quilligans.

David and Jeannie had phoned to pre-order a bottle of cava and some orange juice and we enjoyed a Bucks Fizz breakfast! Love you guys!

Later in the day we were round at Gill and Eddie's and walked round to the Marsh Mill craft village, where Fran and Gill wanted to buy some things.

I took the camera along to get some shots of the windmill.

And speaking of photography, I'm afraid I bust my film scanner one night this week. So if anyone was wondering why it had gone slightly quiet on my Flickr site (no longer active) then that's why. It's going to have to wait until I find a replacement.

Considering how long I have had it though, I should think I could probably get an upgrade in quality or at least size resolution. And I'm looking for one that can do my 120 roll film negatives and slides too.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

The Family Album

I've not added many photos to the Flickr account over the last few days as I've been scanning mainly family type photos.

Such as this one which was taken on my daughter Gill's 18th birthday back in 1995. I've had the film scanner for ages but of course every time Windows decides to upgrade (to be more honest, it's every time I buy a new computer so around once every 5 years or so...) the thing stops working and I have to download new software and drivers.

These just keep getting better and better though and I see photos in a state of pristine sharpness and colour (though not unfortunately cleanliness) than I've ever seen them before.

This always leaves me in a kind of quandary of whether to carry on scanning stuff that I've never scanned, or should I go back and do all the cruddy stuff again?

This one is of a line dancing event at Thornton Windmill and Craft Village that Gill helped to organise as part of her HND course at Blackpool College in 1997.

The only problems with scanning slides and negatives is that they are:

1. inevitably dusty and dirty, even having been kept in proper storage sheets


2. hardly ever dated, leaving me wondering how old people look...


3. time consuming! Editing out the worst of the dust spots in Paint Shop Pro is laborious and a hair on a negative leaves a huge white worm trailing over the photo!

It's worth doing however. It would certainly have helped if I (and my parents and grandparents before me) had written names and dates on the backs of their photos. Make sure you label yours. Or when you get a bit ancient you'll be wondering "Darn it... what was she called...?"

Thornton Windmill As It Was

This is Thornton Windmill taken in 1984 before the craft village and Tavern At The Mill pub restaurant were built. Thornton is reached by heading inland from Cleveleys, near Blackpool. The area around the mill at that time was just scrubland and a high concrete fence surrounded the back of the mill. The photo was taken on a 2¼" square colour transparency or colour slide, on a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera. I've currently no way of scanning such large transparencies so this was scanned from the 1985 Blackpool Gazette calendar in which it appeared.⁽¹⁾ This was my first calendar publication. The following year I had not only the front cover of the calendar but another two or three shots inside also. The front cover was shown on a previous posting.

The windmill is the tallest one in the Fylde (the larger area including Lytham, St Annes, Blackpool, Cleveleys, Poulton and Singleton). There are around half a dozen windmills still standing in the Fylde with another two "over Wyre". At one time though the sails of around 40 mills could be seen from the top of Blackpool Tower. Built in 1794, by the 1920s the first two floors of Thornton Mill had been converted into tea rooms, run by the Misses Barter and Baldwin who advertised:

The Ideal Place for Motorists
DAINTY TEAS, LIGHT LUNCHEONS
Rooms let for picnic, Wedding and
other parties. Parking Ground.

(1) Having subsequently bought a scanner capable of scanning large transparencies, the photographs here have been re-scanned and updated as part of a project begun in 2019 to bring all of my Blackpool entries up to my current standard.

Windmills, Wind Pumps Watermills Index

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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