The Horwich Plague Pits

The Horwich Plague Pits is in Rivington

Sometime in the late 1960s an old map of The Platt of Horwich, dedicated to the landowner, Sir Thomas Barton; “came to light”, says MD Smith in his book About Horwich, in which he also reproduces a nice, clear copy of the map. “Platt” is an old word that means the same as “plot” does to us, in reference to a plot of land. The map itself shows the various plots of land together with their names and/or names of their respective tenants, in the far west part of Horwich as we know it today, just before the River Douglas is reached and the school and from the Pike road all the way down towards Blackrod. The map was made by William Senior, professor of mathematiques and is dated 1620. The map is a pretty good fit when overlaid on the old OS maps with many boundaries still in the same place and odd corners or sections of others still visible.

There are a ton of interesting features marked on the map and one is the site of the old plague pits that were a bit of a legend when I was a kid but until I was older and had access to maps and Google Earth there was some confusion caused by the position of the ‘modern’ road and the old track that once led to Rivington being offset by some distance. I think this has also confused a few people in the area, leading people to think the site is further north-ish than can be seen by overlaying the maps.

Now, in his book, MD Smith states that the plague pit must relate to a well documented and particularly virulent outbreak of plague in 1623. I believe this being later than the annotated date of 1620 on the map causes Smith to state that the map must have been edited after 1623. He doesn’t reveal any explanation as to why or how he knows it was edited, I assume it was this confusion over the dates. There have been plenty of outbreaks of plague over the years and by 1623 people had learned not to re-open old pits to bury new dead. In fact in the area the worst years for plague mortality were around 1628 - 1631. There was an outbreak a few years prior to 1623 and although lower mortality rates are documented, they’re not much lower.

There is no reason to assume the plague pits on the map date to later than the annotated date on the map of 1620. I am sure the map simply illustrates the location of the pits as they are on the land of Thomas Barton and would presumably not be let at pasture land to tenants.

It should be noted that the trees on the map, seemingly upside down would probably indicate the text was added after draughting but this was probably done “in the field” which would explain the various degrees of writing proficiency throughout.

I am not going to write about the Thieves Grave here - other than to mention that in his book Smith also misinterprets the label of the adjacent plot to the plague pits as “oerhey greone”. However the cartographer clearly writes “T” (there is an extended tail on the left of the crossbar seen on Ts and Ws throughout the map) and “V” (he writes “U”) in the same way here as in other places on the map. The text possibly says “Thevy Greave” which is perhaps a misspelling of “Thieves Grave”. The map is full of misspellings or that is to say various spellings of each name that are repeated across the map. E.g. “Oliver Horrocks” - “Olyvers Horocks”, “Whittles” - “Whyttles” and so on. Back in the day (1620) spellings weren’t fixed as they are today. Johnson’s dictionary wasn’t published until 1755 so there was no place to look them up. People tried to write the sound of words using whichever letters that came to mind, sometimes in an odd order too. “Theives” is a bit difficult to spell for some people today :)

On the other hand the second word could be “streawe”, which is an archaic spelling of “straw”, which would indicate this field was used for straw - boring but quite probable.

Ok, let’s align the various map sources, I’m using a GIS rather than dropping things on top of each other in Photoshop. My map sources here are William Senior/Thomas Barton (1620), OS First Edition (1847) before construction of the reservoirs, MOD? Aerial (1961), Google Earth Aerial (1999?).

Things to note are the small pond that is marked on both the 1620 map and the 1847 and can be seen as a patch of rushes where the ground must still be boggy. The small “hillocke” shown on the 1620 and shown here cut through by the modern road in 1961 - before the rest of the houses where built on that side of the road. The sharp bend in the river shown on the 1620 and slightly altered in 1847, the little stretch of river adjacent to the pond looks straighter in 1847 but note the boundary line in 1847still follows the line of the river as shown in 1620. This is very important as you may note further upstream the modern course of the river diverges from the 1620 map but the boundary line does not. The boundary was obviously created along the old path of the river and it’s course was altered some time later, probably to drain fields or supply water for industry. Today several small quaries are present along the river and these will have diverted its course. Note also that just here the river is today culverted beneath the modern road.

Downstream from the plague pits the two maps diverge slightly and the boundary follows the course shown in 1847, maybe the boundary was altered here to follow the river or maybe the river course changed before the boundary was made. In any case it has altered much more since then, as part of the “Douglas Diversion” when the reservoirs were constructed.

The bend in the river on both 1620 and 1847 maps is a no-brainer when we note the boundary follows the old river route even though the modern river is straighter here. The little “hillocke” in 1620 is compelling too, when we bring in the 1961 aerial and the remaining part of the mound can be seen.

I’m aware this must be out by several metres in places, but I’m at a larger scale here than you’re OS Explorer maps that you’re so fond of and I can forgive Senior in 1620 for a few wiggly lines, without the skills, equipment and manpower of the Ordnance Survey a couple of hundred years later. As the boundary of one side of the old pond is shown to be the boundary of one side of the plague pits he had a well defined area to work with and the plague pits area is more than a few metres in size.

What I find most strange is that we hear nothing of any “discoveries” while the road was being constructed, Leverhulme had an interest in both history and archaeology, although he probably didn’t have access to the 1620 map (before it “came to light”), he would have been very interested if anything had been found. Is there some documentation we don’t know about? Plague pits usually aren’t that deep, especially the older ones, people were in a hurry and possibly sick themselves. In cities plague pits can have been buried deeper under rising construction, as are some old Victorian streets. Not here in this rural pasture. Maybe roads aren’t that deep, or perhaps this section was “built up” rather than bedded down. Maybe something was disturbed but covered up, so as not to delay the reservoirs project - who knows? I’d watch out if you’re digging that garden across the road though.

Further to this the “hillocke” is that “rising mound” that Hampson tells us was known as the Thieves Grave in his time but… I said I wasn’t going to talk about that here, this is about the plague pits…

So spare a thought as you make your way along that pleasant avenue, for the poor dead that placed hurriedly in this mass grave, in desperate times long ago. If you’re looking at the llamas, the mass grave of the Horwich plague dead is probably not far under you’re feet.

Horwich Plague Pits map

Marker type: Ruin

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