00:00Today we're in Worsthorpe, a village just to the east of Burnley.
00:06It's an ancient place, although there's not a great deal of evidence of the really ancient history of this area.
00:16I'll give you an example. We're in the square, we're standing on a grassed area, right in the middle of the village.
00:25But the first references I've ever come across to Worsthorpe are to exactly where we're standing.
00:33Because it is conceivable, but without proof, that this area was what's either a Bronze Age or an Iron Age fort.
00:44I've looked around for evidence and the village has been built over the past 2,000, 2,500 years.
00:53And if there is something, we'll have to dig up the square to see if there's any evidence.
00:59But it tells you that Worsthorpe has been a significant place for a long time.
01:08Now the other thing that is worth mentioning here is the name of the village.
01:13When I was a pupil at a junior school in Burnley, St John's, we took a few Catholic children from Worsthorpe.
01:21And one of them was asked, because we were doing a project on local history, what was the origin of the name of Worsthorpe.
01:30And I can see him now, he said it was because there was the Worstthorn, meaning thorn tree, Hawthorn tree, and therefore the name Worstthorn came about.
01:45The tree must have been somewhere around here.
01:48Now I thought it was a bit pubious, I was about 7 or 8, something like that at the time.
01:54And later on, some years later, I looked at some,
01:57Worstthorn means Werther's thorn.
02:03Werther was probably an Anglo-Saxon leader, or lord of some description,
02:10and he planted a tree to mark a boundary.
02:13Now if he planted a tree, it's a lot easier than moving a big stone to a boundary.
02:19And that is probably what he did.
02:24We're in Trumster Church, and as I said, it dedicated St John.
02:29And it was built in the 1830s, but unlike a lot of other churches in our area,
02:37it was largely paid for by one family.
02:41The leading citizen of this part of the borough in those days was the Reverend William Thursby.
02:48Now he was the joint owner of the Hargreaves Colliery Company in Burnley,
02:54which was Burnley's biggest industrial enterprise.
02:58He was a very wealthy man.
03:00And he came to settle in Burnley when, through his wife,
03:07he inherited half of the Hargreaves Colliery Company.
03:11So, when he arrived here, he decided to live at the Hargreaves Old House,
03:18which is in Cleviger, in that direction.
03:21Not very far away, only a walk away.
03:25But he found himself in Worsthorn at a time when there wasn't a church.
03:31In the late 1830s, I think it was 1837, the church was opened.
03:38And we are looking at it now from the tower.
03:42The tower behind me was not part of the original act and of late time.
03:48But much of what is remaining in the church is basically William Thursby's church.
04:01The graveyard has been here for a long time.
04:04He's been here for a long time.
04:05He's been here for a long time for a long time.
04:06But it does contain a lot of interest in Greene.
04:09The historian, just Saul Wilkinson, is buried here.
04:14And he was born in Worsthorn in 1825.
04:22He lived until he was 90.
04:24I think he died in about 1917.
04:27He lived in Brightliff for a lot of his life.
04:30He was at Mispas in Blackpool, where he was a furniture dealer.
04:35But when he came back to this area, he lived to the east of Berkeley, in both Worsthorn and Brightliff.
04:45And he was a celebrated local historian.
04:50Now, he was much challenged for the things that he wrote in his own lifetime.
04:57He was said to have exaggerated things in his own lifetime.
05:03Said a great deal that was maybe exaggerated in a lot of the histories that he wrote.
05:10And most of the things that he did write, he wrote for articles in local newspapers.
05:15He only had one book, Memory of Hurstwood, printed.
05:21But if we went to the Greystone, which we're not going to do now, it says on the Greystone,
05:30Here lies Tattertoll Wilkinson.
05:33And the word lies in Italian.
05:35It's a reference to his historical exaggerations in the books.
05:41This is the most attractive former village school, which has survived.
05:47A lot of village schools have been demolished.
05:50But this one is now divided into several really attractive houses.
05:56And it's got a view over the village square.
06:00It's the pub opposite and the shops.
06:03It's in the centre of the village, but it is really an attractive location.
06:08I think if we had played our cards right in the past, we would have preserved more buildings like this one.
06:16Because it's a typical village elementary school built in Victorian time.
06:23We've got nearly all the features of schools of that time.
06:26The only thing it's not got, really, in those days the Victorians believed that the boys and the girls should be kept separate.
06:33And they usually had entrances that were separate.
06:37There would be a girl's entrance, a boy's entrance, and an infant's entrance.
06:42The boys and the girls would be in what we now call the junior section.
06:47So as you can see, it's a really pleasant church.
06:51As you can see, it's a really pleasant school.
06:56Now, in the village here, we are very fortunate because there is not only one monument.
07:03There are two. They're only a few yards apart.
07:06And the one behind me was built by some public subscription in 1862.
07:13And it's a stone pillar, which I think originally was intended to be a fountain.
07:21I can be corrected on that. I'm not 100% certain.
07:25But we know much more about the other thing.
07:28The monument is behind me.
07:31This is Worsthorne's Gormus.
07:34And you might say, what does that mean?
07:37Well, in the centre of nearly all of the communities around here, there is a lamp boat.
07:46This used to be standing in the road.
07:50And it was therefore subject to traffic.
07:53The ones in Burnley were on main roads like St. James Street or Westgate.
07:58And they're called Gormus by local people.
08:02If they're always standing in the road, you might get run down.
08:05But this is the one for Worsthorne.
08:08It took me to go to Bates, Worsthorne Parent Council.
08:12But it is in relatively good condition.
08:16And it should remain where it is.
08:20A reminder of a past when street lighting was introduced.
08:28It wasn't until the 1820s that street lighting was introduced in Burnley.
08:34There were gas lamps.
08:36And the Burnley got its first gas company, a private company, in 1823.
08:46Later on, after they laid pipes in Burnley Centre, they laid them to other parts of the town.
08:56And some of these monuments here, you could call them, had a practical purpose as gas lamps.
09:06Others were not gas, they were electric lamps because they were built later on.
09:12Now I've got to admit, not coming from Worsthorne, I don't know whether this was originally a gas lamp or an electric lamp.
09:21It's got all of the features of a gas lamp.
09:24So it was constructed as that.
09:26I don't know when, but I do know that by the end of the Victorian period, outlying villages like Worsthorne and Brightly got their electric and gas installed to all the houses.
09:47On the corner of Raven Oak Lane, near the square, is this row of properties.
09:54They were built in the middle, through early part of the 92 century, as hand loon leavers cottages.
10:02Worsthorne did have two cotton mills, but they came later.
10:07Almost all the residents of Worsthorne were hand loon leavers or workers in quarries.
10:14These houses were built for them.
10:18Now, today houses a really good village store, which I often call even on the way home and coming back through Worsthorne.
10:26A very good selection of goods.
10:30It also had until recently, relatively recently, a really good tea shop, which I miss enormously.
10:38It had, in the tea shop, a fantastic Burnley-made kitchen range, which was in the area where you had your meals.
10:48And it was a bullcock of Burnley.
10:51And they were really good kitchen ranges.
10:54I'm standing in front of the Worsthorne with Hurstwood parish rooms.
11:01It was built in 1874 by the William Thursby I have mentioned.
11:06It's the centre of whatever goes on, the parish council meeting rooms.
11:11I've been in lots of times.
11:13My sister was a parish councillor until recently.
11:16But every village should have one.
11:19Every village should have a facility like this.
11:22Worsthorne's lucky again, because not only has it got the parish room,
11:27it's got two pubs and a social club.
11:31And they, all three of them together, or four of them I should say together,
11:37they make the community work better together, because they provide facilities for community use.
11:45This one is rather special, because on the wall ahead of us,
11:50is the memorial to Private Thomas Whitton Victoria Cross,
11:58who is one of the several people of Burnley, who in the First World War,
