Buildings of Interest

Description

From Herbert Worsley's “The Dwindling Furrows of Lowton” (1988):

In my schooldays, this very old inn was a calling place for the farmers on their way to Wigan market. Each Thursday in the late afternoon the farmers from Croft and Risley rested and watered their horses at the inn, a long wooden water trough along the garden fence was a noticeable feature...

In the early '20s the inn floor was still paved with flagstones which were 'stoned' each day and spread with clean sand or sawdust, several large spitoons of copper and brass holding a porcelain bowl part filled with sawdust were placed here and there for the use of the tobacco-chewing miners who frequented the tap room...

There were large open fires round which the locals gathered, including a few tough characters... The son-in-law of the landlord in the years immediately following WWI remembers catering for wagonette parties, and the early charabanc trippers who made the Hare and Hounds their favourite calling place..

. As I write this old inn is being renovated, only recently the contractors discovered a well right by the foundations of the rear wall. It was in perfect condition, a memorial to the men who had the skill to build these shafts of brick without using mortar, the depth was 60 feet, with the surface of the water 42 feet. It had not been used within living memory, but a few of the last generation can remember pushing stones through the cracks in the flagstones covering the well and listening for the sound of the splash a few seconds later...

[The contractor] is fairly certain there is another well in the inn-yard...

Text and image provided by the Makerfield Rambler

Painting by the late W A Soper