As a kid I heard the legend of the Thieves Grave and the old gallows tree by the “robbers patch”, as it was said to me. It was terribly entertaining and a quite gruesome as these things should be. I was directed to the “llama field”, as it is known today. Between the allotments and the River Douglas, beside Rivington Lane, near Horwich Crown.
I’d also been told a vague story of King Arthur having fought in our area. I’d read quoted text from Whitaker’s book in a much later, but still old to me book. It was also mentioned briefly by Birtill, which I think is where most people got it from who mentioned it to me, without really any details.
Sometime in the 1980’s I’d started trying to find prehistoric sites in the area, it involved visits to the library as the internet wasn’t around then. I’d read in a book, a report of a visit by archeologists to the “site of possible barrow”, in a compilation book, I think from the ’50s. Of course I never found the barrow as a kid and didn’t really understand where the location was. I was looking near the site of the later Anderton Hall and not the older one - idiot. It’s been bugging me a bit ever since.
On the map of Horwich Platt of 1620, near the site of the Horwich Plague Pits, enclosed in a crook of the River Douglas there is a small plot of land that is marked “hillocke”, an archaic spelling of hillock, an archaic word for a small hill, sometimes quite a tiny hill. Usually in this area “hillocks”, are found to be small-ish glacial mounds of gravel or boulder stones that were left behind by glaciers.
The area is partitioned off from other plots and is bounded as noted, by the river on three sides and on the fourth side by the plague pits. The land is probably not desirable for farming as it seems to contain trees, a hillock and a small pond and is very close to the plague pit.
There are books, published around 1775 by Rev. John Whitaker, a rather vocal antiquarian who had an obsession with proving that Blackrod was the site of Coccium - a Roman fort and settlement. He also wanted to prove that the legendary King Arthur fought several battles along the River Douglas. Or rather to prove that the battles of Arthur as listed by Nennius - an obscure character assumed to have been born around 769CE, and probably a monk. In olden times it was assumed the history of Nennius was true, today Nennius seems in many ways suspect. It must be borne-in-mind however, that even in Whitaker’s time, historians were expected to incorporate the biblical flood and other such nonsense into their histories.
I will write about King Arthur’s battles around the River Douglas another time, suffice to say the time-period that Whitaker has in mind throughout is that of a couple of hundred years before Nennius as the native Britons battled the Saxon invaders. Although out of favour with modern Arthurians -ists - whatever, it’s a great legend for our area and there are compelling pseudo-facts.
It is important to me that you, patient reader, keep-in-mind that Whitaker’s work is the only source that mentions “Hasty Knoll”, all other works are later and quote or mis-quote Whitaker.
In his books about the history of Manchester and the Saxons, Whitaker contradicts himself several times, both in trying to prove his “Roman station”, and also the battles of King Arthur which would have occurred at least a couple of hundred years later. My interest here is the local landforms that he uses to illustrate his cases.
Whitaker’s roman road would have roughly followed the modern A6 road and he reported to have found many sections of road, around three yards wide and well constructed from the local gravel. He states in his books many areas where it seems perfectly preserved sections of road could be found. While in other places rough areas of gravel indicate a ploughed-out or damaged section of road. Rightly or wrongly his proposed road was not taken seriously as it didn’t and still doesn’t fit with the “conventional wisdom”. About seventy years later Sibson reports that he is able to find scant evidence of Whitaker’s road, but he is so taken with Whitaker’s detailed descriptions that he himself believes in the road but finds it difficult to believe that it can have been lost since. As stated he reports scant evidence of his finding the roman road, but doesn’t describe any evidence he has found. I think he was being kind by not saying “no evidence”.
Regardless, Whitaker decides to place Coccium somewhere near the modern A6 road, in the direction of the River Douglas. He describes a large barrow “closely adjoining”, the site, whatever that means. He seems to contradict himself however by stating the roman station must be more than a mile from where the road lay. To be clear, he has placed Coccium on the slopes of the Blackrod hill to the north-west (toward Adlington) - and - he has also placed Coccium over a mile away from the A6 road we are familiar with today. Whitaker’s book is so old it still uses “f”, for “s”, but I have edited that to make it more readable.
…town of Coccium or Blackrode as the regular tradition there asserts was erected along the slope of the present hill and continued within a few yards off the station the barrow called Hasty knoll and the river Douglas…
seems to be at odds with this,
…we must procede for more than a mile in the direction of the above-discovered road, before we can expect to find the site of the station. Advancing then in this line and for this length, we come to the river Douglas … And here assuredly was the camp of the Romans. Here the Douglas forms a large crook in its channel, a brook discharges its little urn into it, and natural or artificial banks appear on the sides. Closely adjoining to the site is a considerable barrow; and tradition speaks of a remarkable battle near it,
Whitaker also tells of the battle and station a mile and a half from Blackrod,
The tradition was some years ago very lively at Blackrode among three or four of the most ancient inhabitants, concerning a battle maintained by Arthur about a mile and a half from that place, and close to the site of the Roman station. These chroniclers of tradition are now deceased and the memory of Arthur seems to have expired with them.
Whitaker seems to require the Roman station, the barrow mound, the Roman road and King Arthur’s battle at the same location. I wonder if he believes each gives credence to the others, which is strange as they would be of very different times. Whitaker would like the barrow to be of the time of the Saxon invasions, but all other local barrows are prehistoric. He tells of remains found within the barrow [bracketed inserts are mine]:
And on the scene of this traditionary engagement [the Arthur battle] remained to the year 1770 a considerable barrow, popularly denominated Hasty-knoll, and constructed in the British manner [Whitaker means to say British and not Saxon]. It was originally a vast collection of small stones taken from the bed of the Douglas; and great quantities have been carried away by the neighboring inhabitants. Many fragments of iron had been also occaisionally discovered occasionally in it, the remains of those military weapons which the Britons reposited with their heroes at death. And in the summer of 1770, on finally levelling the barrow, was found a cavity in the hungry gravel immediately under the stones, that was about seven feet in length; the evident grave of the British officer, and all filled with the loose and blackish earth of his perished remains.
Of course there are a ton of problems here, and in my opinion with Whitaker’s Roman roads - not to discard the idea, just to say that Whitaker’s reports are suspect. He is not researching Arthur’s battles as we might, as an interesting bit of fun - he believes King Arthur was here. All the barrows in this area have been found to be prehistoric, not from battles between ‘Britons’, and Saxons. Roman remains have been found in the area but his idea of the fort have been discounted by the conventional wisdom. Coccium is now supposed to have been where Wigan is today.
There are no, known artefacts from Hasty Knoll and there are no other reports of any, from anywhere other than Whitaker. I don’t believe Whitaker saw the barrow, his book was published a few years after 1770. His reports of distance from Blackrod to the Roman station and Hasty Knoll being around 1.5 miles (by calculation from his road and by word-of-mouth from his “Chroniclers of tradition”) are at odds with his own theory of the Roman station being on the slopes of Blackrod hill. He is rather vague in his descriptions of the mound, Roman station and where abouts on the Douglas he means. He is not at all vague about other things.
I think he is describing a real mound as he published just a few years after, plenty of people would remember it in the area.
We must remember that Whitaker probably believed the universe was 6000 years old and knew nothing about glaciation. The gravel he mentions from Hasty Knoll and I think in tracing his Roman road is probably the glacial sediments that follow both the course of the Douglas and the nearby Middle Brook - before the reservoirs. There have been gravel pits nearby in later years to quarry out the glacial gravel sediments.
Hasty Knoll could have been a glacial mound and could have been removed by local inhabitants, burials have been found deposited in some glacial mounds. It could have been a barrow but it probably wouldn’t have been constructed in the way Whitaker describes.
Hasty Knoll is a strange name and it’s root could possibly be from the Old Norse “hestr”, meaning horse; but I think more likely “hyrst” from Old English “eminence, hillock, knoll or bank, esp. one of a sandy nature; a grove of trees ; a copse ; a wood ; a wooded eminence.”, or again Old English “haes”, literally “oak or beech wood”.
Knoll is generally accepted to mean a small hill or rounded hill and although it is itself from an Old English root, it is probably added here later to describe the shape of a small hill.
So a small hill or “hillock”, possibly of a rounded shape and possibly wooded with Oak or Beech.
Incidentally to this, and as I have noted elsewhere, the nearby town of Horwich has been reckoned to take its name from the Old English “hár” and “wice” or to us, “grey witch-elms”, again Old English “hár”, meaning “grey” and “wice”, meaning “elm wood”. Maybe old place names round here are all about trees. Rivington, might once have been Rowanton and derive its name from the Rowan tree. They are not uncommon and often seen with their large, bright-red berries. Note that alternative meanings could be applied such as “wice” meaning a dwelling place and “hár” in this place could be grey, as in the grey, local stone; but there a plenty of local “hollins”, “withins”, “yarrow” etc. Of course there are plenty of references to the “grey stones” too.
I think it is not inconceivable that Whitaker was told about the mound but it wasn’t in the place he’d like for his Roman station, or he believed it was already gone and didn’t look for it.
A similar barrow, not too far away at Castle Hill was opened in 1843 by Sibson et al. and can be seen here in the sketch by Sibson. The Castle Hill barrow was also on low-lying land, by a confluence of small rivers and is probably not dissimilar to Hasty Knoll. Interestingly Sibson’s party seem to have been looking for a “Celt”, buried directly in the ground below the centre of the mound. However, they found a deteriorated, off-centre, crematory urn burial, as we might expect.
In a diary entry of October 8th 1785, Captain Roger Dewhurst of Halliwell tells us:
“I am to draw for Mr. P. the tumulus at Anderton Ford.”
Mr. P. here is Mr. Pickford as he mentions earlier in the entry. It seems likely this is the old Anderton Ford in the area near where today we find Anderton Ford Bridge, which carries the road towards Chorley from Horwich Crown; for in an entry dated October 16th 1785, Captain Dewhurst writes:
“I begg you will present Mrs. D’s and my compliments to the family at Roynton…”
He has been unable to attend due to an accident where his servant has been injured cleaning a gun.
“Roynton” here is the old name for Rivington. Although we are told earlier in the diary that Mr. Pickford lives “two and a half miles beyond Bury”, he was evidently attending a family at Rivington and Dewhurst was to be present. I am sure he intended to draw a tumulus (another name for a barrow or burial mound) in the vicinity of Anderton Ford, while visiting Rivington.
Incidentally, the area of the old Anderton Ford Bridge farm, that once stood just to the east the start of Dryfield lane was once know as “Old Lowe”, “lowe” is derived from the Old English “hlaw” which means hill or mound, but surely in this instance it is an old family name, as in “Lowe’s old farm”.
Anderton Ford Bridge, is located about 1.26 miles from Blackrod and about 1 mile from the A6 where we might imagine Whitaker’s Roman Road.
In his book about Horwich, published in 1889, Thomas Hampson - THE source for most of the local history books since his time tells us of the “Robbers’ Walk” or “Thieves’ Grave”, and its associated legend. I was told about this when I was a kid, but I assume it was after Birtill, after Hampson.
I will interject here, one variant name for the area or legend is the “Robbers’ Pad”, now this has always bothered me, “pad”? Well, I wonder if it has been written in times of old, for until not long before Hampson’s time the old letter Thorn was still in use. In capital form it looked a lot like a letter “T” or “Y”, that is an upside-down, spikey thorn. In its lower case form it looks like a slightly curly letter “d”, it has a small crossbar near the top though. The sound of the letter in words was the same as “th”, is to us today in words like “with”. We don’t use it anymore we use “th”, and our letter T uses the shape of Thorn. There is another way to write upper-case Thorn that looks a bit like a letter “p”, but I think this came later.
Incidentally to that, “Ye Jolly Crofters” pub name, uses the letter thorn in its spelling of “Ye”, which is “The”, but in this case Thorn has lost its shape to become a “Y”.
Anyway, I can imagine the “d” in pad could be a mistake in reading the old lower-case Thorn letter and could have actually been “path”, which makes sense. That would be important, because it means the legend is written elsewhere, before Hampson, but we don’t have any known document for that today.
In fact the only place you can find the legend reported is by Hampson, or by later writers getting their information from Hampson’s book.
The legend itself is quite spooky if you like that sort of thing. I find it a bit tedius, like one of those folk songs that isn’t that good and has far too many verses. Hampson lays it on with a trowel. I guess you’d call it a tragedy. I’m not going to reproduce it here, but to rapidly gloss over it…
An evil “Lord of the Manor”, along with his Forester henchmen treat the lord’s tenants cruelly. The henchmen rob wild honey from the lord’s forest and blame the tenants so the lord intends to judge them and kill them. The tenants run off into the forest and form a band of outlaws - sound familiar to anyone? The outlaws perform raids until their leader is captured and hanged, “upon an old oak tree”.
When the lord is away from home the outlaws kidnap and hang the lord’s “children three”, from the same oak tree. The lord soon returns and hangs the outlaws - one assumes from the oak tree. In the tale he never finds the graves of his murdered children. I don’t know why - “hey what’s that fresh-looking ‘rising mound’? That wasn’t here the other day”.
Hampson also tells us that because of the murder of the children and their burial in unconsecrated ground, the ghosts of the dead outlaws “perambulate the spot, not far from a rising mound that marks their youthful graves”. He continues to relate that years later some sort of Christian ceremony was performed to make the ground consecrated. Now you know why we don’t see the ghosts today. (I’m winking at you)
In the book, Hampson describes a number of paths that form ridges leading up towards the side of the Rivington and Blackrod school, that he says “modern progress has, however, destroyed”, but he is describing the old path, which before Rivington Lane was made led up from just beside Anderton Ford and would have crossed the modern Rivington Lane, just around where the bridge over the Douglas is today, having crossed the douglas without a bridge - possibly a small ford or stepping stones that are common in the area in days of old. The road wasn’t made in Hampson’s time but the old path seems to have gone out of use and was shifted to head along the path of the current Rivington Lane.
Hampson annoyingly tries to insist that these ridges could be called “pads” as in the “robbers’ pad”. It is a very small area and the upper part is still today the small green area between the Douglas and the modern road that leads to the back of the school. I imagine the foot traffic that forms Hampson’s “pads”, would be from pupils cutting across to the school, as still today is the case on the part that remains.
This track was never an ancient one, it didn’t exist a couple of hundred years before Hampson’s time, I believe Hampson is mistaken in directing us to his pads. As was the case until recently - before the additional buildings of the school. It is a shortcut to Old Wills lane, without having to go around the corner. In a 1960’s photograph by the MOD, you can see very similar paths have developed to those which Hampson described, however, I suspect Hampson’s would have radiated out from the river crossing near Thieves Grave, which was the position of the route he refers to. In Hampson’s description the stone bridge we see today hadn’t yet been built, but the track was straightened to the line of the route of the modern road (Rivington Lane) and a footbridge had been installed.
Much like Whitaker, Hampson cites some old Horwich inhabitants for the source of his tale.
In case you’re wondering, our word “paddock”, comes from “parrock” and is nothing to do with “pad”, it’s just a lazy way of saying “parrock”, as probably is “park” - though I haven’t checked. An enclosure in any case, not a path.
The thing I’m interested in is Hampson’s “rising mound”. The only thing in the location he describes is the “hillocke”, shown in the old map from 1620 and not at all on the modern maps. It is beside the start of the Douglas diversion but there is a band of trees between and they are shown on all the maps, including the 1620, so earth could not have been moved through them during construction of the Douglas diversion.
The modern Rivington Lane does cut through the area, perhaps across the northeast half or more of the mound. Although the mound is not shown on the modern maps, the adjacent pond is on the 1620 map and is still, or its area is shown as a marshy patch on even up-to-date maps of a large enough scale to show such things.
I have noted elsewhere that in an aerial photograph from around 1961, there appears to be a section of the mound remaining beside the modern road. That spot is now occupied by a house, I assume this finally levelled the remaining part of the mound, if any remained at all. I don’t know of any archaeological reports during Leverhulme’s construction of Rivington Lane, or in the building of the house.
A prehistoric, polished axe head was found just upstream in the 1940s.
The “Thieves’ Grave” mound is/was about 1.6 miles from Blackrod and about 1.4 miles from the modern A6 that may be where Whitaker indicates his Roman road. I mention this with regard to the quotes from Whitaker:
“The tradition was some years ago very lively at Blackrode among three of four of the most ancient inhabitants, concerning a battle maintained by Arthur about a mile and a half from that place, and close to the site of the Roman station”
and,
“…we must procede for more than a mile in the direction of the above-disovered road… Closely adjoining to the site is a considerable barrow”
respectively.
I believe the location descriptions Whitaker supplied from the locals of Blackrod are an accurate distance to the Thieves Grave site and that Whitaker discarded it as he would like to place his Roman station on the slopes of Blackrod hill, towards perhaps Adlington. He mereley switches to a more convenient crook of the Douglas, but he doesn’t adjust the distances accordingly.
The old path that includes the “Robbers’ Pad”, in Hampson’s text is the same track that lead up from the old Anderton Ford, past Hampson’s Thieves’ Grave mound and on to “Roynton”, as it was then. Dewhurst, who was supposed to attend would have known Anderton Hall, the old site of which is near Anderton Ford. I imagine on the route of the old track, Anderton and Roynton would have been the two main places one could name. The Thieves Grave site is less than half a mile on the ground by the old track from Anderton Ford, while Roynton would be around two miles. So I am tempted to imagine Dewhurst might refer to the Thieves Grave mound as the “tumulus at Anderton Ford”, as Anderton Ford would be the nearest “named” place on the track. In Morden’s map of 1695 he shows Blackrode, Harwich Chapel, Andtonford and Raventon as the named local settlements.
Mythical kings, legends and Robin Hood clones aside, I think there was either a tumulus or barrow-like glacial mound beside the River Douglas until at most a century-or-so ago. I think the last bit may have remained after the construction of Rivington Lane. I think Hasty Knoll, the Anderton Ford tumulus and Thieves Grave mound are one in the same and were a known landmark on the old track from Anderton Ford to Rivington for people in the local area. There is a fairly direct route from Blackrod almost to the start of the Anderton Ford track, and maybe it went over the ford, but it’s intersected by the modern road today.
I expect Whitaker’s words are strange because he has no way to interpret a barrow in the way we can today, plus he is obsessed with Romans and King Arthur. Dewhurst seems more sober because he doesn’t attempt to interpret the nature of the tumulus. Hampson tells a probably fictional “legend”, but he saw the mound in his own time and gives a location that agrees with a “hillocke” on a much older map, a hillocke that is missing today. On the site of a modern road and even more modern house. Dewhurst seems reliable at least, his evidence is first-hand, though anecdotal.
If the three described burial mounds are not one in the same, the alternative would be that three large burial mounds. One large enough the be described as of “considerable” size, one large enough to be labelled a “hillocke” and later a “rising mound”, the third, worthy of being sketched by an artist rather than an interested antiquarian, existed alongside the River Douglas, all within say, less than a 1 mile stretch of a small river and all completely lost apart from a single historic mention each.
It is far more likely that they are all references to the same mound. Sizeable in 1620, perhaps like the Castle Hill mound. Perhaps constructed of the glacial gravel or stones of the local area and perhaps gradually robbed-out for construction by locals, but still mostly intact in 1785, when Dewhurst intends to make a sketch or drawing. By Hampson’s time in 1889, he describes a “mound” or “rising mound”, he would be aware of tumuli or barrow mounds and does not describe it as such, but he does name it as a grave. Recall the adjacent “plague pit”, it could have been placed there as the locals of the time knew the barrow and it’s association with burial of the dead.
I’m sure Leverhulme would have investigated had the construction of Rivington Lane turned up anything unusual, but then I know he did investigate several other local sites and I don’t know where to find the details of those either. Just brief mentions of his work on the Two Lads.
I don’t mean to be overly critical of Roman occupation or roads in the area, just maybe of Whitaker’s reports. He at least seems to have embellished things, which leads to a distrust in his other details. Also the further use of his reports as hard-evidence in later authors work, even in the face of not being able to find evidence on the ground.
It’s taken a long time and a number of happy coincidences for these pieces to come together, and it’s a win, win, win situation as we could have up to three more lost ancient sites in the area. I was always disappointed as a kid by the lack of ancient sites in the area, until I started looking a little harder. There are places where you can still see the old landscapes through gaps in the modern.
The books I mention in this article include the report I think perhaps by John Winstanley of looking for the Anderton tumulus. Books by Whitaker, History of Manchester in four books and Saxon History of Manchester. History of Horwich by Hampson. Various by Birtill, he is a mentioner of many things and a detailed describer of less, but he is one of my favourites alongside Rawlinson.
Sketch of Castle Hill Barrow (circa 1843) image by E. Sibson
The "hillocke" in 1620 image by Sir Thomas Barton
Blackrod, Anderton Ford and Thieves Grave image by Google, munki-boy [concept / portions of image]
Old Track from Anderton Ford image by Google, munki-boy [concept / portions of image]
Similar "pads" to Hampson's but in the 1960s image by MOD, munki-boy [concept / portions of image]
The "hillocke" shown cut through by the modern road in 1961 that is also marked on the 1620 map image by MOD, munki-boy [concept / portions of image]
