Blackrod, Lancashire
Historical Description
Blackrod, a village, a township, and a parish in Lancashire. The village stands on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, on elevated ground near the river Douglas and the Bolton and Preston railway, 4½ miles SSE of Chorley, and has two stations on the L. & Y.R., and a post, money order, and telegraph office under Chorley. Its site is supposed to have been occupied by the Roman station Coccium, on Watheng Street, and many Roman relics have been found. The township comprises 2388 acres; population, 4021. The inhabitants are chiefly engaged in bleachworks and collieries. A fire in a colliery here was extinguished by directing the river Douglas into it. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Manchester; net value, £380 with residence. Patron, the Vicar of Bolton. The church is good, and there is a Wesleyan chapel. A free grammar school, founded in 1568, and now incorporated with one at Rivington, has an endowment producing an income of £260, besides an exhibition of £65 per annum at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and there are charities amounting to £200 per annum.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Lancashire | |
Civil parish | Bolton | |
Hundred | Salford | |
Poor Law union | Wigan |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Church Records
Ancestry.co.uk, in association with Lancashire Archives, have images of the Parish Registers for Lancashire online.
Civil Registration
For general information about Civil Registration (births, marriages and deaths) see the Civil Registration page.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Blackrod from the following:
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Lancashire is available to browse.
Maps
Online maps of Blackrod are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Lancashire newspapers online: