There are two ways out of Bolton, to Chorley and Preston; known severally as the Chorley Old and New Roads. The old road ascends windy heights, and although still a practicable highway, is of such a character that any traveller—not being a professional explorer of old roads—who finds himself on it, and perceives the new road going flat, below, is deeply sorry for himself. The way into this old road is by the group of houses called Dorfcocker—where the “Tempest Arms” displays the Tempest cognisance and their motto, “Loywf as thow Fynds”—and along Boot Lane. Thence comes a steep steady ascent past the “Bob’s Smithy” inn and the cottages of Scant Row—well-named in its meagre, hungry look—to the “Horwich Moorgate” inn with the subsidiary title of the “Blundell Arms.” Did any authority compensate these unfortunate inns when the traffic was diverted into the “New” road? Let us hope so, for the doing of it deprived them—not of a livelihood, else how could they have continued to live?—but certainly of all save the merest means of existence. There remains yet a look about the “Moorgate” inn which tells you that not always did it rub meanly along on selling beer to rustics or mill-hands. Alas!

Henceforward, having reached the summit, and not wishing to remain on this wind-swept height, it is necessary to descend: that is obvious enough. But not easily is that descent made. To Avernus the transition is reputed to be easy and comfortable: to Horwich, where the old and new roads join, it is martyrdom, especially if it be undertaken on a cycle. And so descending, cautiously and with alternate prayers and curses, over the agonising pits and gullies in the neglected setts of the Chorley Old Road, to the only less fearful surface of the Chorley New Road at Horwich, we come at the two hundredth mile from London to the great lake-like reservoirs of the Liverpool Waterworks, formed in 1848, stretching for a long way alongside the road, and occupying the site of Anglezarke Moor. To a height of 1,545 feet rises the sullen mass of Rivington Pike, in the background, crowned with its masonry beacon. There are at least two dozen other reservoirs of different sizes up there, in the vast gloomy moors where the Pike presides: reservoirs in solitudes looking down upon the circle of busy towns comprising Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Blackburn, and Preston, and supplying their needs.

The great reservoirs beside the road, fenced from it by an ugly dwarf wall and iron railing, are full of fish, and in most respects like natural lakes; but the scenery, bold though it be, is scrubby and hard-featured, and the scant trees look to those used to the softer and more luxuriant vegetation of the south, starved. But if one has courage sufficient to follow the waggonette-loads of beanfeasters from Bolton, who favour these scenes, there will be found a quite charming wooded glen and waterfall at Dean, beyond Rivington village.

That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself. Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago, down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in 1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the Mayflower, in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish. The poet represents him as the elderly widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission, as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map, across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea.

Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into Preston.

Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast, a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to the outskirts of Preston.

Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills. Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge, rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in 1366 and rebuilt in 1752.

Walton-le-Dale, the village on the right, looks a peaceable place enough, and it has little history, but it came very near being the scene of a bloodstained struggle between Catholics and Presbyterians in the Old Pretender’s rising of 1715. Nearly the whole of the Catholic gentry of Lancashire had turned out to aid the Pretender’s forces, and the rebellion was almost on the point of changing from a dynastic conflict and a clash between Whig and Tory ideals into the very much more serious matter of a religious war. The rising of the Tories and the Catholics stirred to furious antagonism the Whigs and the Low Churchmen, but most of them blew off their rage in violent language. Not so the valiant Boanerges of the dissenting chapel of Chowbent, near Bolton, who not only breathed fire and slaughter, but took the lead of eighty among his congregation, whom he marched off to the front; the front being the passage of the Ribble, over against Preston. There the embattled minister—this valiant Parson Woods, “General Woods” as they called him—posted his men to withstand the crossing of the river, and was said to have drawn his sword and sworn he would run through the body the first man who showed signs of timidity. Having arrived there, armed only with what Baines, the Lancashire historian, calls “implements of husbandry”—what a beautiful phrase, covering the ungainliness of the poor crooked scythe and spade!—in front of a strong force of rebels, armed with implements of war, they doubtless were timid; but the bold advance of General Wills saved the situation, and Parson Woods had no excuse to embrue his hands in gore. But King George the First, recognising his earnestness, sent a gratuity of £100, which Woods promptly divided among his men; they in their turn handing it over towards rebuilding their chapel.

For the rest, there remains but to remark upon this singular epitaph, dated 1685, in Walton-le-Dale church, before we have over the bridge into Preston:

“Here lyeth the body of a pure virgin, espoused to the man Xt Jesus, Mrs. Cordelia Hoghton, whose honorable descent you know. Know now her ascent.”