Читать книгу The Ribble Way. A Northern England Trail онлайн

27 страница из 28

Some 40 yards before Walton Bridge, where you meet the main road, is the site of Old Ribble Bridge, which on 17 August 1648 was contested in the struggle for control of Preston during the Civil War. After a three-day battle Charles I’s forces were finally defeated by the Roundheads, and tradition has it that afterwards Cromwell retired to the Unicorn Inn by Darwen Bridge to plan his subsequent strategy.

Preston claims Saxon foundation in the seventh century, and with charters later granted under Henry I and Henry II, was undoubtedly a medieval town of some importance. It sent a representative to Parliament from as early as 1295, but sadly no buildings from those early beginnings have survived. The only memorial to Preston’s several ancient gates is in street names such as Fishergate, Friargate, Bishopgate and Stoneygate.

In his Tour of the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) Daniel Defoe remarked that it ‘has a great many gentlemen’, but it was the industrialisation of the later 18th century that moulded the town we see today. Richard Arkwright invented his water frame for spinning cotton in Stoneygate, paving the way for a textile industry that helped Britain dominate world trade throughout the Victorian era.