Chapter I Rochdale Before Domesday

" i„ l i~u, 11 Chapter One ROCHDALE BEFORE DOMESDAY : 1086 THE STORY OF THE ROCKS . ETWEEN the Parish Church of St. Chad and the site of the ancient castle nearly half a mile away to the south west, stands a seven ton rock which, older than either, is yet a comparative newcomer B to Rochdale, for it was brought by the glaciers of the Ice Age and dropped when they melted . The boulder itself is a kind of milestone between the Age of Mountains and the brief Age of Man-beneath it lie the layers of coal- measures and millstone grit,-around it flows the everyday modern life whose very character depends on the amazing contents of the local rocks which are hidden below the busy streets of the town and the moorland soil of its boundaries . Rochdale owes much to the men who realised the importance of the boulder : it is one of the largest in the district and eventually, in 1893, permission was obtained to transport it from Cowm Top, Castleton (or Back Lanes Estate, near the present Works of Messrs. David Bridge and Co.), to Broadfield Park, where it now rests near the Park Street entrance . Very fittingly, at the foot of the Park Slopes stands the Library, the meeting-place and focus for members of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society . It is thanks to the energy and often heroic endeavours of this society that so much of the town's history is known . The preservation of the boulder is only one typical example of the efforts recorded in those volumes of Transactions which have provided much of the material for the following pages . 2 ROCHDALE RETROSPECT The late Mr, Maxim, for instance, prepared for the Museum a chart to illustrate how, during the crinkling and cooling of the earth's crust, the Continent was several times submerged by floods . The coal seams of Rochdale were formed from swamp forests condensed by sandstone and shale beds which were themselves compressed deposits of sand, mud and silt . Surface clays were left by glaciers after the general sub- sidence of land which led to the separation of the British Isles from Europe . How long ago was this? Very roughly, the age of the Archaean and Primary, or oldest rocks in the world, may be reckoned in hundreds of millions of years, the Secondaries in scores or tens of millions and the Quaternaries in thousands of years . To the Primary Age belong the first fossilized remains of life : the protozoa or jelly-specks-some enclosed in shells,-also the corals, sea-scorpions and first fishes . The Secondary Age saw the appearance of reptiles, followed by the Tertiary mammals, such as elephants and horses . Not till the Quaternary Age was the Broadfield boulder dropped . One of the earliest and most fascinating fossils discovered in this district must surely be the pseudo-scorpion included amongst finds by Messrs. Baldwin, Parker, Platt and Sutcliffe at the Old Sparth Bottoms brickfield .' The only other specimen of this kind ever found before was at Mazon Creek, Illinois, U .S .A . Dr. R. M . C. Eager, of Manchester University, in a paper revised in 1952, 2 refers to " the unique arthropod fauna collected from Sparth Bottoms, near Rochdale, where king-crabs, giant millepedes and scorpions have been found " in the Coal Measure (or Upper Carboniferous) strata, which he dates from some 240 million years ago. How many of us realise that the lowly club-mosses and horse-tails which still grow in marshy places are the descendants of the Lepidoden- drons with 100-foot tall trunks, and the 10-50 feet high Calamites or reeds of the Carboniferous forests? 3 THE BOULDERS ARRIVE. With the coming of the Quaternary Age, another type of rock was deposited above the remains of the swamp-forests . Mr. Walter Bald- win's sketch-map of Rochdale's once-glacial lakes 4 shows how the great ice-sheet, which once covered most of England, flowed in an approximately N .W . to S.E. direction across the Rochdale area, damming up streams into lakes which filled the Naden, Whitworth and Littleborough valleys, depositing accumulations of sands, gravels and clays, tearing rocks from the Lake District and S .W. Scotland and letting them fall during the melting of the glaciers. An 1892 chart made by the then Borough Surveyor, Mr. S . S. Platt, shows 370 individual stones scattered round Rochdale's granites from Criffel and Dalbeattie, or from Eskdale, volcanic rocks from the Lake District, limestones, etc. and some local grits, sandstone, flagrock, tank and ganister. The Cowm Top boulder in Broadfield Park is of andesite, probably from Coniston or Borrowdale ; ROCHDALE BEFORE DOMESDAY : 1086 3 another large boulder, of native rock, by the Esplanade, is visibly much scratched and polished by the action of the ice . With the passing of the glaciers came conditions favourable to Man, hut, for many thousands of years to come, the compressed forests, or coal, and the impacted sand-grains, or good building-stone, were to lie neglected . Adaptation alter Walter Baldwin . Glacial Lakes of the Rochdale Area . FIRST MEN. The different stages of Man's progress have been named after the materials which he gradually learnt to use and which have outlasted his own mortal remains . First, he chipped small pieces of stone or flint into tools and weapons, secondly, he discovered copper and bronze, and, lastly, iron. The Stone Age has three divisions, the Palaeolithic being the oldest, then the Mesolithic, or middle era, followed by the Neolithic, or new, Stone Age ending in approximately 2000 B .C. THE FIRST WORKSHOPS. Microliths of the middle period (or " pigmy " flints so named because of their size), lie buried in soil below the peat of the Lancashire and Yorkshire border, which is one of the richest Mesolithic areas in Europe. The existence of these tiny scrapers and barbs in Lancashire was first realised by Mr. James Horsfall, who, together with Dr . H. Colley March and Mr. Robert Law, was amongst the local pioneers of research- 4 ROCHDALE RETROSPECT work concerning Rochdale flint implements . Concentrations of pigmy flints have been found on Know] Hill, and on Middle Hill (north of Brown Wardle) ; more than a dozen of these prehistoric " workshops " are grouped on the Saddleworth hills south-east of Blackstone Edge, and scattered finds have been unearthed on ground over 1000 feet high in a semi-circle from the north-west to the south-east of Rochdale . This is clearly shown by Dr . Margaret Davies' chart of Mesolithic sites and moorland peat .6 She suggests that these early hunters lived in shallow pits on plateaus above the dense forests of the lowlands . Evidence provided by the Peak District shows that the microlith makers hunted for their food the wild horse, the ox, the red and roe deer and the pig . Smaller prey, such as hare and duck, also existed at this time . THE STORY OF THE PEAT. The Pennine peat itself contains the pollen of land forests which flourished as the climate grew warmer. First came the cold-resisting trees of birch and pine, then hazels, elms, oaks and alders. Amongst the lower levels of these compressed forests are the leaf- and lozenge- shaped arrow-heads of the Neolithic herdsmen : the barbed arrow-heads of the Bronze Age traders are rarer ; a fine example some II in. long was discovered on Trough Edge in 1888 by Dr . March . Lying above sandstone and grits, the heavily rain-soaked peat contains humic acid and is a good preservative, although not of iron and bones . The discovery of very early human bones on Hades Hill is therefore all the more remarkable. HADES HILL BARROW AND HUMAN BONES . In 1898, during a bitterly cold and wet winter, Messrs. J. T. Hill, W. A. Parker and W . H . Sutcliffe opened up a " round " barrow which measured 52 by 45 feet .? They found inside it, protected by a covering and circle of sandstones, the remains of a two-tier urn and the broken, partly burnt bones of a small person, probably a woman, together with burnt flint implements and flakes, part of a jasper flint being marked with the signs of the sun and moon . There was no metal, but there were also animal bones, including the burnt tooth of an ox, and quartz pebbles . A striking fact was the lack of human teeth, which may have been kept to form a memorial necklet or amulet . The urn bore the marks of its maker's hand, being of partly baked clay, and ornamented with a kind of chevron design, perhaps the imprint of a grass rope . This might be considered an early attempt at twisting fibres : specimens of Bronze Age woollen cloth have been found on the Pennine moors near Halifax . The shape of the barrow, the two-tier urn and the ox tooth - all suggest that this was a Bronze Age or Early Celtic burial place . THE KIMMERIDGE BRACELET. , Another important discovery is the bracelet of Kimmeridge shale found on Flint Hill, east of Blackstone Edge, by Mr . J. H . Price in 1929.8 This type of shale comes only from Dorset and objects made of it are ROCHDALE BEFORE DOMESDAY : 1086 5 extremely scarce in the Pennines . The bracelet, about 3 ,5 in . in total diameter, is the most perfect specimen of its kind in the country- circular, smooth and plain, like another of the Early Iron Age found at Glastonbury. Other orna- ments of Kimmeridge shale have been taken fromYorkshire barrows of the Bronze or Early Iron Ages .

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