Helmshore
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Helmshore is a village in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire. It is situated south of Haslingden, broadly between the A56 and the B6235, approximately 16 miles north of Manchester.
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[edit] History
The village is dominated by the spectacular flat-topped Musbury Tor, once the centre of the Earl of Lincoln's Deer Park. Dating from the early 14th century, stretches of the ditch enclosure can still be seen at Grane and Alden valleys, and deer are still occasionally seen in the area.
Helmshore owes its development to a damp climate that is ideally suited the development of the wool, cotton and linen industries. During the Industrial Revolution, along with neighbouring communities, it expanded enormously as mill owners such as the Turner family built terraced dwellings to house the workforce necessary to run their cotton mills.
Helmshore has had a second major expansion since the 1970s with the building of a large number of new estates, often for commuters to Manchester. However parts of the village - and the surrounding countryside - remain very attractive.
[edit] Textile mills
Originally Higher Mill, Helmshore Mills Textile Museum is a water-powered fulling mill and a 19th century condenser cotton spinning mill, with working machinery. Built by the Turners in 1789, it now details the changes made in textile technology over the last three hundred years through the use of interactive displays. Mill ponds, weirs, sluice gates and an aqueduct are also part of the museum as well as a 19th century working waterwheel, fulling stocks and other machinery associated with the finishing of woollen cloth, an original Arkwright water frame , and a Hargreaves Spinning Jenny.
In 1856 Joseph Porritt established Sunnybank Mill, an enormous mill which once housed the worlds largest spinning mules. The other main Helmshore mill dynasty were the Whittakers, one of whose mills makes up part of the Textile Museum.
[edit] Miscellany
One of the world’s first municipal bus services linked Helmshore to Haslingden in 1907.
Every year, an athletics race takes place - The Musbury Tor Mile. The race is thought to have started in the early years of the last century, but it was stopped after the farmer withdrew permission to use his land. Latterly the route was altered when a cobbled path was deemed to be unsafe, and it actually measures nearer two miles than one - a mile up and a mile back down. Since 2004 the race has been taking place again.
The nearby Snighole (eel-hole) on the River Ogden is a local beauty spot, and much of the surrounding countryside and moorland is popular with walkers.
To the south on the old pilgrim road is Robin Hood's Well, and above that is a cairn and memorial stone in memory of Ellen Strange, generally believed to be a young girl murdered by her lover - an event recorded in a Victorian ballad by John Fawcett Skelton but now known to be a murder of a wife by a husband in 1791 that has become replaced by a colourful, but fictional, story.
[edit] External links
Helmshore Mills Textile Museum site
