IX 

 NORTH LANCASHIRE: STOCK-RAISING 



ONE is accustomed to think of Lancashire as a 

 dreary conglomeration of factories and smoke- 

 blackened houses ; but all the little valleys of the 

 Mersey tributaries in East Lancashire show the 

 remains of their old beauty, and the upper dales 

 on the fringe of the moorland were still fair to see 

 within living memory. Even to-day there is a large 

 piece of the county north of the Ribble that is purely 

 agricultural, some of it as remote and solitary as any 

 spot in England. Between Ribble and Lune the flat 

 country of the seaboard is known as the Fylde, rich, 

 easy-working land that is highly farmed and depends 

 chiefly on the production of milk. Our route, however, 

 lay inland into the hill country known as the Forest 

 of Bowland, where rise the headwaters of the Wyre 

 and of some of the Ribble tributaries, a region of 

 moorlands on the Millstone Grit forming an outlier 

 of the Pennine Chain, but separated from the great 

 limestone masses of Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent 

 by the upper Ribble valley up which runs the 

 Midland line to Scotland. From Blackburn we 

 travelled by Whalley, with its ruined Abbey- 

 memorable for its association with the Pilgrimage of 



Grace, but now stranded in the midst of factories 



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