Skullduggery in Lancashire

We give Eileen Roche her head in this tale of wildest Lancashire. . .(from Northern Earth 69)

High on the Pennines, looking over the Ramsbottom valley, stands a lonely row of old cottages on what used to be known as Canro Lane. They face the monumental four-square tower, astride the hill over the valley, put up to commemorate Robert Peel, the 'inventor' of the Police Force. The lane was once part of a major highway from north to south, and locals still tell you that Dick Turpin rode Black Bess this way. Reputed to be a Roman Road, today it peters out into a green lane running between fields down into the valley to Turton.

For years I have been visiting relatives in these parts, repairing to the local hostelry higher up the moor at Affetside by footpath. These remote places are now becoming townified, trim estates being built on the fields, running streams and brooks tidily forced underground by pipes, wells blocked up and the old cottages transformed into des. reses.

Years ago, the Assistant Hangman from Manchester living in one of the cottages was the first in the neighbourhood to get colour TV, and we were all invited round to watch The Black & White Minstrel Show in glorious colour. Some of us were too busy watching the Hangman to enjoy the TV show.

The pub up on the moors, built in 1443, was famous locally for the old battered human skull kept in the bar. This enigmatic grinning relic was quite a friendly type of skull: after a few drinks, communication with it became quite easy, and towards the end of an evening's festivities, particularly after a good game of dominoes, it could be heard singing along with the rest. This summer (1996) I trekked up to the Pack Horse to see if the skull was still there, and to remind myself of its history.

Earlier, I had been to see the archaic stone head found in a local reservoir nearby at Rivington when the waters ran low a couple of years ago. The stone is kept in the Great Barn in Lever Park, not to be confused with the other ancient stone head known as 'Th' Head in't Wall' previously built into the drystone wall around the reservoir [the nearby bridge is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of an unpopular foreman who 'fell in' to the reservoir - JB].

Affetside is still today a small hamlet on the high point of the moor, clustered around a Roman Road which is itself part of Watling Street, built in 79 AD between Manchester and Ribchester. This part runs parallel to Canro Lane lower down the hillside. It is quite likely that both were ancient roads which the Romans included in their road improvement schemes.

Affetside's heyday came in the 1700s when the packhorse movement was at its height, servicing the Bolton - Rossendale Valley traffic with two blacksmiths and three inns. The inhabitants were a law unto themselves, very rough types, with thirty-four bastards being born to them between 1814 and 1834, a rather high proportion for the small population. A travelling preacher was sent on horseback over the wild moorland to sort them out, as they were considered "heathens". It would seem likely that these wild people of the remote moors kept up parts of the old religions, possibly including the head cult habits.

Just down the road from the Pack Horse, the sole survivor of the three Inns, stands a stone stump of a column, the remains of an old "Roman Cross", which the locals tell with pride stands exactly halfway between London and Edinburgh. It is an obvious omphalos, and no doubt was formerly associated with gods and goddesses of the Trivia. The Roman deities sat very easily with the local indigenous gods and goddesses of those times, although we know that the Romans were trying to stamp out the habit of head-collecting.

About 1890 treasure seekers pulled down the Cross in a fruitless search for buried gold, and it was re-erected with a new stone base. Records show that at Affetside, the Roman Road formed an interesting multi-point boundary between the parishes of Bolton le Moors and Bury, and the villages of Bradshaw and Tottington. The Roman Cross and its multi-junction boundaries forms a fellow guardian of the moortops with the square masonic tower seen clearly over the valley on Peel Hill opposite.

The travelling preacher did not seem to have done much good for the attitude of the people of Affetside: in 1954 they voted to secede from the township of Tottington, under which they fell, because they did not have a water supply and were fed up getting water from the communal pump at the Pack Horse. The attempt at secession failed, so the following year they wrote to the Queen, which only resulted in many of the local wells being condemned. In the mid-sixties, they still had no running water, Tottington sending up a water cart three times a week. It was 1971 before Affetside was finally connected to the mains, and with the usual perversity, some locals had to be served the following year with statutory notices requiring connection.

It is in this community that the Pack Horse skull has been preserved. Today it sits on its own shelf high up above the bar, and 'The Pack' has been modernised and enlarged. The current landlord, Tony Hughes, has found the skull becoming quite a tourist attraction, with articles about it in local papers and magazines, so that he has a printed history framed on the wall for customers to read. Alongside is framed this witty ditty:

Them that buys beef buys bones
Them that buys land buys stones
Them that buys eggs buys shells
Them that buys ale buys now't else!

The landlady, Lynda Hughes, thinks that the body belonging to the skull is buried in the field opposite the pub, as locals have explained it. The truth is that nobody knows how long the skull has been at the Pack Horse, or how it came to be there, or why - it seems to have been there so long that no-one is sure any more. The skull itself, tobacco-stained and now fragile, with a loose lower jaw, cannot tell.

The story is that the skull belonged to a local man called George Wherwell, who executed James, the seventh Earl of Derby, in nearby Bolton in 1651. This was during the Civil War, when Bolton was a Parliamentarian town. The Earl had led Royalist troops in the Massacre of Bolton, and having been caught, was forced to spend the last night of his life in Bolton at the Man and Scythe Inn in the town. The chair in which he sat used to be displayed hung up on the wall of that pub - customers at the Pack tell me that it is still there.

George Wherwell was local to the Affetside area, and his family having been attacked by Royalist troops, he volunteered to be Axeman and behead the Earl. Later, because he had acted as the executioner, the Royalists cut his head off, and it was displayed on a pike outside the Pack Horse as a warning to the other inhabitants and travellers along the road. It would seem in keeping with the wayward nature of the Affetsiders that they brought it inside the pub instead, especially if their older inhabitants still retained memories of the ancient custom of keeping heads around the place.

It is beautiful synchronicity that two executioners, two Roman Roads, and two significant hilltop monuments, separated by centuries and different traditions, are associated with the same Lancashire moorlands and the lawlessness or otherwise of the inhabitants. Indeed, it seems more likely that the genii loci of the moors have truly shaped the peoples' behaviour, than the human activities have shaped the moors.

Information from Mr. & Mrs. Hughes; their customers at the Pack Horse; local inhabitants; Turton Local History Society Publication No 15 Affetside An Historical Survey 1984.

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