External Events and Announcements
As you will appreciate, many external events may change their details at short notice. We therefore ask you to contact organisations directly for up to date information about whether their events are going ahead as advertised. Please note that the RHC cannot provide further information on these events and announcements, nor be held responsible for any inaccuracies in what is posted below.
Mourholme Local History Society
Wednesday 26 February 2025 Thomas Mawson: a Lancastrian garden designer,
with Brian Smith.
Thomas Mawson designed gardens in the area, including Grey
Walls in Silverdale, and Rydal Hall in Ambleside. The talk tells of his remarkable life
and the gardens he designed.
Wednesday 26 March 2025 Cromwell’s northern journey 1648, with Nick Burton.
An imagined journey walking in the footsteps of the New Model Army across Yorkshire and Lancashire to fight the Battle of Preston.
Meetings are held in Gaskell Hall, 17 Emesgate, Silverdale LA5 0RA. Annual
membership costs £10, or £18 per couple. Visitors pay £2 to attend a single meeting.
www.mourholme.co.uk
Eden Project Morecambe
The team will provide the latest updates and plans on the project, with an opportunity for Q&A.
This event will be held on Tuesday 4 March, 6-7.30pm at the Morecambe Winter Gardens, Marine Road West, Morecambe, LA4 4BU
Register via the trybooking event webpage.
Keep up to date on the project by visiting the Eden Project Morecambe website where all the conversation recordings are located. Future dates/times and locations will be confirmed on the website.
Lancaster Litfest 2025
Litfest returns for a series of free and low-cost cultural events from 7-17 March 2025, with some events of special historical interest.
On Saturday 8 March 11.00am, local educator Eleanor Levin will lead a walk on Historical Women of Lancaster - Lives in Writing. The tour will be meeting at Lancaster Castle Gate, is wheelchair accessible, suitable for age 10+ and lasts about 1 hour 45 minutes.
This tour focuses on women’s words and writing about women, including a nurse writing postcards home from First World War France, an upcycling artist, a loom-breaking luddite, an anti-slavery campaigner, a child (much discussed but little understood), a thief, a duke and a poet.
Tickets are free but places are limited. For full details of the programme, please visit the Litfest 2025.
Then to mark International Women's Day on Saturday 8 March 7.30 pm, Eleanor Levin will be in conversation with Corinna Peniston-Bird, Professor of Gender and Cultural History in the Department of History at Lancaster University. The venue is the Auditorium at The Storey, Lancaster.
Eleanor and Corinna will speak about a number of the historical women featured on the tour as well as discussing the process, 'mansplaining' and how the tour became the focus for a wellspring of passion for women’s history, creating a sense of community amongst attendees, and revealing an unbroken thread between the lives of historical women and our lives today.
Tickets for this event are £5. To book, please visit the Litfest 2025 website.
Preston Historical Society Talks
Monday 10 March 2025 19th Century Lancashire Work Songs & Broadside
Ballads - Jennifer Reid
Monday 14 April 2025 Your history on your doorstep: Exploring
Lancashire Archives & Local History - Alex Miller
Monday 12 May Chimney pots and chamber pots: Working-class
housing in 19th century Lancashire - Geoff Timmins
All talks are held at Central Methodist Church, Lune Street, Preston PR1 2NL on the 2nd Monday of the month (September to May). Doors open at 6.00pm for a 7.15 start. Visitors are welcome, £5 per talk.
Burnley Historical Society
Meetings of the Burnley Historical Society are held on Wednesdays at 2pm at St John’s R C Church, Ivy Street, Burnley BB10 1TB. Members free, guests £2.00
Next talk: 12 March 2025 Sex and scandal in the Victorian era – Lavinia Tod
Lancaster History Lecture 2025
As part of a collaboration between Litfest and Lancaster University's History Department, acclaimed medieval and Tudor historian Helen Castor will present The Eagle and The Hart on Wednesday 12 March 6.30pm at The Faraday Lecture Theatre, Lancaster University.
Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their lives were entwined from the beginning. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side, carrying the sword of state: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king.
Yet, as the animals on their heraldic badges showed, they grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a thin-skinned narcissist, and Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Henry had all the qualities Richard lacked, all the qualities a sovereign needed, bar one: birthright. Increasingly threatened by his charismatic cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, in a time of constant conflict, rebellions and reprisals. When he banished Henry, the stage was set for a final confrontation, as the hart became the tyrant and the eagle his usurper.
Theirs is a story of power, legitimacy, and the limits of rule and resistance. In her 2025 Lancaster History Lecture, Helen Castor shows how, in Richard’s hands, kingship became tyranny, and explores the costs – personal, political and constitutional – of opposing the threat he came to represent.
Joining Helen Castor will be Dr Sophie Thérèse Ambler, Reader in Medieval History, Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy and a Research Fellow at The Ruskin at Lancaster University.
Free tickets are available, but must be booked through the Dukes Lancaster website
Kirkby Lonsdale and District Civic Society
The Kirkby Lonsdale & District Civic Society will be holding a study day on Saturday 29 March - Place Names, Landscape & Society in Medieval North West England with Dr Alan Crosby. This event will take place from 1pm - 4.30pm in the Barbon Village Hall, LA6 2LL
Tickets cost £10. For more information and to book tickets, please email kldcstalks@gmail.com or telephone 07821 088484.
Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Local Studies Conference
CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) Local Studies Group is holding a conference on Monday 7 April at Manchester Central Library, St Peters Square, City Centre, Manchester M2 5PD
A range of guest speakers will discuss connections between Local Studies and community wellbeing, and there will be a tour of Manchester Central Library and an introduction to the Local History Collections. Tickets cost £30 (including lunch) for non-members.
For more information and to book tickets visit the CILIP website.
Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire Online Talk
One-place studies – their place in the historical landscape by Janet
Barrie.
Janet Barrie, the chair of the Society for One-Place Studies, researches the
people and activities associated with the Springhill area of Rossendale. In this talk, originally given in September 2024, she examines the principles of conducting a one-place study. Available now on the Society's website
Working Class Movement Library Exhibition
To mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, the Working Class Movement
Library is hosting an exhibition The collectors, the cameraman, the poets and the pits until 25 July.
The artefacts on display are all taken from the library’s own collections. The photos
were taken by John Harris and were framed to show the dispute from the miners’
point of view. The poems were written by women, some of them the wives of miners.
Thus the exhibition gives the unique perspective of people who were there.
Venue: 51 Crescent, Salford M5 4WX. www.wcml.org.u
Weaving History Podcasts
A brand new research podcast, Weaving History, has launched. It uncovers a forgotten piece of Lancashire’s working-class history and was created by two Lancaster University Alumni from the English and Creative Writing department. Combining Victorian poetry and interviews with leading experts, Weaving History tells the story of the Cotton Famine in a fresh and accessible way. It connects the cotton weaving industry in North-West England to the American Civil War, the fight against slavery, and Victorian literature. All six episodes are available to stream, so Listen to all episodes now!
Lancashire Archives and Local History
We're delighted to let you know that Lancashire Archives and Local History now has a Facebook page!
You can also follow Lancashire Archives on X (formerly Twitter)
Also, back issues of the new Lancashire local history magazine 'Archives' are now available to purchase in all Lancashire County Council libraries and at Lancashire Archives, priced at £3. If you'd like to receive a copy by post, please contact the Archives at archives@lancashire.gov.uk.
If you have an idea you’d like to discuss, please contact archives@lancashire.gov.uk to discuss your suggestion.
Rookhow Open Days
Rookhow is a Historic Grade II* listed 1725 Quaker Meeting House in the heart of the Rusland Valley. Set in 12 wooded acres between Coniston and Lake Windermere, open days are held every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month.
Filmed Production of 400-Year-Old Play By Shakespeare's Contemporary Lady Mary Wroth
A 400-year-old play, which captures how the delights and difficulties of courtship have changed (or not), is now freely available on film thanks to Professor Alison Findlay, Professor of Renaissance Drama in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association.
‘Love’s Victory’, by Shakespeare’s contemporary Lady Mary Wroth, was written c.1617-1619 and is the earliest surviving romantic comedy by an Englishwoman.
The performance is the result of nearly 30 years of work by Professor Alison Findlay. Her research project, ‘Shakespeare and His Sisters’ was set up to explore the works of Shakespeare and his female contemporary dramatists in site-specific locations. The 2022 production, directed by Emma Rucastle and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Lancaster University, was designed to recreate the conditions of an early household performance. It was staged at the author’s home, Penshurst Place in Kent, in 2022.
Bob Dobson, Heritage Books
Bob Dobson has been dealing in second-hand Lancashire interest books for over 50 years and due to retirement is selling stock at half the catalogued price. From Lancashire Acts of Parliament to dialect poetry and old picture postcards, there is much to interest the local and family historian. To receive a catalogue, please email Bob at landypublishing@yahoo.co.uk. He can also be contacted on 01253 886103 or 0774 9838 444 (text preferred).
The Leyland Historical Society
Meetings have resumed in the Shield Room, Banqueting Suite, South Ribble Civic Centre, West Paddock, Leyland, PR25 1DH. £5 for visitors (but new members are always welcome). Visit The Leyland Historical Society to find out more.
British Association for Local History
The British Association for Local History has a new feature, the Ten Minute Talk, which has proved so popular that there are now ten talks and presentations available on their website, on subjects as diverse as nineteenth-century small businesses, marriage in early-modern Suffolk, construction of a Cambridge gas holder or the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic of 1918-19, so please do take a look.
Local and Family History Resources
Zoe Lawson of the Lancashire Local History Federation has kindly gathered a list of helpful resources. The following is a selection of free websites.
Genealogy Sites
Ancestry and Find my past are well known and offer a 14-day free trial.
Family search is the largest site to offer free access to records from old censuses, birth registers, etc. It includes the International Genealogical Index (IGI) which has parish records for several countries including Australia, Canada and the USA, as well as the UK.
Genuki doesn’t hold records but contains a vast amount of historical information that will help you find the records you need from anywhere in the UK.
Jewish genealogy website.
Births, Marriages and Deaths. The Register Offices in the county of Lancashire hold the original records of births, marriages and deaths back to the start of civil registration in 1837. The county's family history societies are collaborating with the local registration services to make the indexes to these records freely searchable at Lancashire BMD.
Free access to records of births, marriages and deaths for the whole of the UK is available at Free BMD, Note that not all records have yet been transcribed.
Archived catalogues are always a good starting point and many online catalogue entries provide significant detail, though not a substitute for looking at the original document when archives offices re-open.
Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire seeks to promote understanding of, and public interest in, Lancashire and Cheshire’s past, through the publication of editions of historical documents. For an annual subscription of £20, members receive each year a hardback volume and an invitation to a historical lecture.
Women In Street Names
Women in Street Names is a project to highlight streets named after women, for the British Federation of Women Graduates, and Harper Adams University. It was launched at the Women’s Library at the LSE in July 2019. Carrie de Silva from Harper Adams explains that the aim of the project is “to highlight streets named after women, (and to highlight how few there are!), and to remember such women as are commemorated. Outputs will be a booklet of mini-biographies of women named and a paper to consider political and social culturalisation, conscious and unconscious, through the names we see in our streets”. Information is requested from across the UK, and from villages, towns and cities. More obscure royalty will be of interest (the collection won’t be including Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II). Obscure or less well-known saints are also welcome. Of particular interest will be little-known local women who nevertheless made a large contribution to their area. Carrie will welcome the name on its own, even if the sender knows nothing else about the named woman. Please forward the street name with district, town, city, village, etc with the woman’s main achievement or area of operation (if you know it) to: Carrie de Silva: cdesilva@harper-adams.ac.uk. (07583 144622).
Cumbria Prehistory Resource
Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (CWAAS) have produced a learning resource to help teachers in the county’s schools support the teaching of prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, within the History curriculum. The pack was produced with input from archaeological experts and feedback from teachers and learners after a pilot session in a Maryport school. It comprises an introductory slide show; in-school activities (covering topics like artefacts, burials, food and the home); on-site activity suggestions (using Cumbrian sites, artefacts and museums); background information and signposts to further information.
The resource pack is free and can be downloaded from the Cumbria Past website.
Or search Cumbria Past in Google, then open the tab Grants, and look under Schools Area.
The Viking Age in the North West
The Viking Age in the North West is a free app which allows you to discover a range of sites in the Wirral that shed light on the history of Viking settlement and integration. These sites range from place names and archaeological finds to stone sculptures. The app comes with a map to help you locate sites, or you can browse through the alphabetical list. There is a brief description and image for every featured site, as well as references to find out more information. It is hoped to expand the geographical range of the app in future, and feedback via the app is welcome. You can download the app for free from the App Store.
If you would like to submit an article for this page or our newsletter, please contact us: rhc@lancaster.ac.uk 01524 593770.