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| Owlet hall |
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| Clegg Moor |
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| Whittaker Hamlet - last known abode of my grandma's aunty... |
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| ...now very desirable properties |
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| Whittaker woods |
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| Hollingworth Lake |
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| Whittaker Hamlet from the track to Hollingworth Lake with Blackstone Edge behind |
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| Hollingworth lake |
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| On the Roman Road to Blackstone Edge |
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| This paved track is 2.000 years old! |
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| It's mainly overgrown, the drainage ditch here is in the middle, there's another at each side |
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| The Aggin stone, a medieval marker up on the moors |
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| In the mist on Blackstone Edge - our car is parked on the faint road curving in the background |
We decided to combine walking with trying to discover more about some of my elusive ancestors so drove up north and across the Pennines from Yorkshire to Lancashire.
I had wanted to see if there was any trace of my grandma's aunty, Mary Ellen Elliott. (Grandma was named after her). Mary Ellen and her siblings were orphaned and while the others stayed in the mill town of Rochdale, she was adopted by a farming family named Butterworth who lived in a hamlet called Whittaker. In 1881, 17 year old Mary Ellen has a baby daughter, Ellen, but after that disappears from any records that I can trace. For those who do genealogy you know how addictively frustrating this is!
We went to the nearest town to Whittaker, Littleborough. Here we searched the churchyard for graves but frustratingly they were all laid flat and were grass and moss covered. We had to give up on the idea that we might find her gravestone so went for a coffee and toasted tea cake in the tea shop. This little town and the surrounding area were so evocative of last of the Summer Wine (for those who've watched it)- I was expecting Nora Batty!
We had a walk we'd downloaded from the internet which went past Whittaker so spent the rest of the morning walking through the woods, past mysterious Owlet hall and up onto the lower parts of Cleggs Moor. The Whittaker hamlet where a few families eked out an existence farming, weaving cotton and stone cutting in Victorian times are now modern dwellings, but the groundsman told us that it is very cold and isolated there in Winter. In the 1880's it would have been quite grim. Back through the woods to Hollingworth Lake and a lunch of soup - the weather wasn't cold but everywhere was damp and misty, especially up on the summit of the moors where we went next.
On the Halifax road there's a spot to park and follow an old Roman Road to where the Pennine Way crosses Blackstone Ridge. The road is well preserved though overgrown across it's width. the higher we went, the denser the mist and on the Edge itself we couldn't see down to where we'd left the car! On a clear day you'd have an amazing view but we just had the evocative, slightly spooky mist! Then we went to Oldham where we spent the night before going further up north....
I used to go to the farm at Whittaker in the mid 1960's. The farm owned everything except the golf clubhouse. They had bought it from a large family called Dawson whose decendants must still live in Littleborough. The farmer was called Ernest Dawson and had lived there since WWII I believe, because we destroyed a lot of WWII tinned food he had stockpiled to feed his sheepdogs. You may be able to make some connections with that name. He must have been born about 1900, very roughly. We converted a lot of the cottages into piggeries and cattle houses, now converted back. Most hadn't been lived in for a very long time
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