You've been very patient with me for the last couple of months while I have been tracing 'Making a Living' up to the present day. I was tempted to get even more topical but have resisted it and want to take you back into some very distant and sometimes murky history.
As you lot know, I love digging into the history of our wonderful town and we are very lucky, there is a lot of it! We can go back with certainty over 2,500 years of activity in what we now call Barnoldswick. So far in fact that we have no idea how it was described then. We have the late Bronze Age trade route from Ireland to the Baltic cutting right through the present town, every time you walk along Longfield Lane and up Park Avenue you are following in the footsteps of traders. If you live in the Townhead/Esp Lane area you are almost certainly on an Iron Age site and all over the town there are tantalising suggestions of early occupation. Then we have the story of the advent of the Cistercian monastery in the mid 12th century and the subsequent story of the monk's influence on Barlick. Enough for anyone to get their teeth into if they want to do some serious research and over the years I have covered most of these subjects.
However, as I spend more time thinking about these matters I begin to wonder if I have been too quick to take the evidence at face value and of late some aspects of this bother me. This unease grows when I look at the tragedy of how we lost our early church in about 1150 when the monks demolished it because it was annoying them. There has to be more to this than meets the eye so I got down to reading my sources again and doing some deeper thinking. I think I have a better idea now of what was happening and so over the next few weeks I'm going to examine the whole question of religion in Barlick again, starting with our old friends the Pagans and seeing what we can find in the undergrowth.
I have to admit that there is a bit of 'intimations of mortality' going on here. After all I'm almost eighty years old and who knows how long I shall have left to ponder on these matters. I have seen too many good historians go to their grave without getting things on paper for posterity. So, while this may not be my last word on the subject it is the state of the research at the present time. If I do pop my clogs it might give someone else a start because what is certain is that there is a lot more to learn on the subject.
I'll start next week by getting some of my ducks lined up. If we want to fully understand the early church we have to go back a bit further and identify some very deep threads in our history.
A popular image of Pagans.
Thankyou