Wheelton Plantation

"Brinscall, about seven miles southwest of Blackburn, was a small farming community owned by the de Hoghton family, who were lords of the manor in the 16th century. When the cotton industry came to Lancashire in the 19th century, a thriving community of handloom weavers was built up in the valley area. William Christopher Wood built the present Brinscall Hall in 1876, and a calico printworks which employed a number of people but which closed in 1928. The ruins of many of these buildings are now surrounded by woodland known as Wheelton Plantation. In 1847 Liverpool Corporation bought the water rights of Withnell Moor from William Bashall Parke, a local landowner, and built Roddlesworth reservoir. The area is now owned by North West Water Authority and is part of the Anglezarke link of reservoirs and also a nature conservation area." From The Lancashire Village Book, by the Lancashire Federation of Women's Institutes (Countryside Books, 1990).

"Withnell Moor in Lancashire appears a lonely wilderness today, to be enjoyed by walkers and wildlife. But only 120 years ago, it was a thriving community and where today piles of moss-covered stones scatter the land, there once stood farms and cottages, green pastures and meadows, all thronging with families who lived, worked and played there." From Recollections of a Moorland Lad by Richard Robinson (Merlin Unwin Books, 2016). 

"In the space of little more than five square miles, there used to be nearly fifty farms, upon which hundreds of men, women and children depended. Then, almost overnight, the march of ‘progress’ robbed them of their homes and livelihoods, leaving behind a landscape frozen in time, with crumbling buildings and lonely vestiges of human habitation." From Lost Farms of Brinscall Moors, by David Clayton (Carnegie Publishing, 2011).