Stacksteads, Piper Bank c.1955

Photo ref: S552003

More about this scene

Piper Bank appears in the census returns of 1851 and on maps of Rossendale as a place name. Edgeside Estate developed over and around it, sad to say swallowing up a horse trough which was fed from a spring in the hills and was thus never empty. Piper Road, like Booth Road where my mother was born, was an old toll road. Piper Bank, sweeping up towards the moors, is traversed by the road built in 1818 through the Glen. Glen Top Brewery (Baxter's) was rebuilt in 1894 with a new chimney, 'Old Smokey', the tallest in Rossendale. The area locally known as Thrutch Gorge features the long tunnel of the Rawtenstall to Bury railway, built in 1852. Road, river and rail run within twenty yards of Thrutch (a dialect Lancashire word synonymous with great effort). On 25 August 1902 an eighty-ton boiler crashed through waste ground at the Waterfoot end of Thrutch Gorge.