The stories behind the hills

A Corner of Lancashire Steeped in Stories

Spring Cottage has been part of Trawden's story for three to four hundred years. When its stones were laid, this valley was still known as the Forest of Trawden: medieval cattle farms were giving way to yeoman farmhouses, and families were working hand-looms by the window to make ends meet.

Step outside today and you are within a short drive of some of the most remarkable tales in English history. The Pendle Witches, tried at Lancaster in 1612, lived in the farms and hamlets below Pendle Hill, the very hill where George Fox had the vision that founded the Quakers forty years later. Over the moor, the Brontë sisters wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and Wycoller's ruined hall, a pleasant walk from the cottage, is thought to be Charlotte's Ferndean Manor. In Colne, the town remembers Wallace Hartley, the Titanic's bandmaster, who played on as the ship went down.

Here are our favourite local stories, with tips on where to see them for yourself.

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Trawden today: the village that saved itself

Trawden made national headlines for the best of reasons. In 2014, with the community centre about to close and the last shop close to shutting, a group of villagers decided to fight back. One by one they took over the community centre, the shop and the library, run by a pool of around 120 volunteers working two-hour shifts. Then, in 2021, the village's last pub came up for sale. Residents had it listed as an asset of community value, and the village of around 2,000 people raised £520,000 to buy it. The Trawden Arms reopened in November 2021, and the Observer reported that Trawden had become the first village in Britain to buy and run its own shop, library, community centre and pub.

The next spring, the Sunday Times Best Places to Live guide named Trawden the best place to live in the North West, asking: "Is this the most community-spirited village in the country?" We think so.

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Wycoller and Jane Eyre

Hidden in a wooded valley just over the hill from Trawden, Wycoller feels like a village that time forgot, and in a sense it was. A busy hand-loom weaving community in the late 1700s, it emptied in the 1800s as weavers left for the new mills, and by the 1890s it was almost deserted.

At its heart lie the romantic ruins of Wycoller Hall, a late 16th-century manor house built on land held by the Hartley family. Its last squire, Henry Owen Cunliffe, a keen gambler, died heavily in debt in 1818. The estate was broken up and the hall slowly plundered for stone; some of it went to build a cotton mill in Trawden. Wycoller Hall is thought to be the inspiration for Ferndean Manor, where Mr Rochester retreats in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and the hall was used to illustrate an 1898 edition of the novel.

Seven bridges cross Wycoller Beck, among them the single-slab Clam Bridge, possibly over a thousand years old, and the twin-arched packhorse bridge, which appears in the film The Railway Children. Lancashire County Council bought the village in 1973 and it is now a country park.

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The Pendle Witches: what really happened in 1612

Forget pointed hats. The real story of the Pendle Witches is one of poverty, fear and a frightening legal system. In March 1612 a young woman named Alizon Device, out begging near Colne, asked a pedlar from Halifax, John Law, for some pins. He refused, and moments later collapsed, probably from a stroke. Alizon believed she had cursed him, and confessed.

The local magistrate, Roger Nowell, soon drew in two rival families, each headed by an elderly woman with a long local reputation for witchcraft: Elizabeth Southerns, "Old Demdike", Alizon's grandmother, and Anne Whittle, "Old Chattox". On Good Friday 1612 friends of the Demdike family met at Malkin Tower, Demdike's home, where they were accused of plotting to blow up Lancaster Castle to free the prisoners.

At the August trials in Lancaster, the star witness was Alizon's nine-year-old sister, Jennet. Ten people were found guilty and hanged on the moors above the town on 20 August 1612. Demdike never stood trial: she died in the castle's cells. The court clerk, Thomas Potts, published a detailed account, which is why the case is among the best documented in English history.

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Pendle Heritage Centre, Barrowford

If you want the whole story in one place, start at Park Hill in Barrowford, home of the Pendle Heritage Centre. The Bannister family settled here in the 1400s, and the house grew from a medieval timber-framed building into the stone farmhouse you see today, with a 1661 datestone. Its most famous descendant is Sir Roger Bannister, the first athlete to run a mile in under four minutes.

The museum tells the story of the Pendle Witches, George Fox and the Quakers, and the vernacular buildings of Pendle Forest, the same kind of stone farmhouses and cottages you're staying among in Trawden. There's an 18th-century walled garden, a bluebell wood and a tea room too.

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Colne: market town on the hill

A mile and a half down the road, Colne has been a market town for centuries. Its parish church, St Bartholomew's, dates from before 1122, when the market was held in the churchyard, and it is Grade I listed. By the 1400s Colne was the main market town of the area and a centre of the woollen trade, famous for a lightweight cloth called kersey. In 1775 the town built a grand Piece Hall (later the Cloth Hall) for the sale of woollen and worsted cloth. It was demolished in 1952.

The Industrial Revolution brought cotton, helped by the completion of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in 1816 and the railway in 1848. By 1891 Colne had 30 cotton mills, with more in Trawden and Laneshaw Bridge. Lancashire's dependence on American cotton brought hardship during the Cotton Famine of the 1860s, when the American Civil War cut supplies and mills across the county fell silent.

Today Colne is best known for its music. Every August bank holiday since 1990, the Great British Rhythm & Blues Festival has filled the town with live music.

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The canal and the cow in the Mile Tunnel

Just north of Colne, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal crosses the Pennines, and it was a colossal undertaking: the first trans-Pennine canal to be proposed, it took 46 years to complete, finally opening in 1816. At Foulridge the canal plunges into a tunnel nearly a mile long, opened in 1796 and known locally as the "Mile Tunnel". Built without a towpath, boats were "legged" through by men lying on their backs and walking along the walls.

It's also home to a favourite piece of local folklore. A cow is said to have fallen into the canal and swum the whole length of the tunnel, emerging at the far end to be revived with brandy. Locals call her Buttercup, and date her swim to 1912.