Slavery, a wonder of the waterways, four witches and a wizard, the Industrial Revolution – what a splendid place!

Oh, little town of Burnley! I still call it my “hometown” even though I was actually born in the neighbouring village of Worsthorne and then was spirited out of England while still a newborn. But I’ve been back three times since and it still feels like home.

So you might imagine my dismay when my recently acquired addiction to Google Earth failed to provide the anticipated “fix” in the form of a splendid satellite view of Burnley, for it and indeed much of olde England is still murky with the green goo of poorly focused cameras. Not to worry, though, because there are people over there with airplanes and film of their own, and thus make possible the following nostalgia trip to bygone blessings.

We’ll get to me and the other famous natives of Burnley, but first a little background on the place.

This is a Disney-esque 2005 vision courtesy of the Burnley Borough Council. Birds flit over church steeples in the sunshine as a lorry rolls happily towards Worsthorne, with majestic Towneley Hall in the near distance on the way to “Sweet Clough” in cheerful neighbouring Padiham, and a hot-air balloon floats above a viaduct and lovely Deerplay Moor. There is, in fact, a Balloon Festival in Burnley every August, and a Blues Festival every April too (in case things start to get a little too cheerful).

It looks wonderful, doesn’t it? Yet somehow I don’t remember seeing a lot of sunshine. There were and still are a great many sooty buildings, typical of England’s industrial north, but Burnley nevertheless has much going for it.

The borough of Burnley, population 91,400, is 25 miles north of Manchester, 50 miles east of Liverpool and 30 miles west of Leeds, putting it, so the local council says, at “the heart of Lancashire and within a few miles of the true centre of Britain”. It’s almost completely surrounded by the drop-dead-gorgeous, hiker-intensive South Pennine Moors, which are an official heritage zone because they were a cradle of the Industrial Revolution – and they really do look great.

It got its start as “Brunley” around 800 AD, in the basin of the Rivers Brun and Calder, and as early as 1294 had a market charter – King Edward I gave the Earl of Lincoln the okay to have Tuesday shopping at “Brumeley manor” – but true commercial fame came with the extension of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal there in 1796, bringing cotton from Liverpool to its scores of mills. King Cotton, as it the trade was called to the chagrin of the American slaves who had to pick the damn stuff, made Burnley, by 1900, the world’s leading cotton weaver.

The Burnley section of the canal includes the Straight Mile, which at 60 feet above the town proper is considered one of the “seven wonders of the British waterways system”. Huh.

Today loads of people, some actually interested, visit the Weavers’ Triangle, a well-preserved Victorian scenario with weaving sheds, spinning mills, warehouses, iron foundries and workers’ cottages. Prince Charles even came to have a look-see in 1986 and pretended to be interested. And Burnley has Britain’s last surviving steam-powered mill, with a steam engine (called “Peace” for some reason) still persuading 300 looms to hammer out hundreds of metres of cotton cloth every week.

There are two of England’s ubiquitous “stately” houses to see here. Towneley Hall (above) was the home of the very Catholic Towneley family from the early 1400s until the turn of the last century, when it was sold to the municipality for an art gallery and museum. Towneley Hall was recently the backdrop for a new BBC costume drama, airing in March, about the serial womaniser Casanova, played by Peter O’Toole in what has to be a case of typecasting. He didn’t make it to the location shoot, though.

Gawthorpe Hall, pictured here and built in the first few years of the 1600s, was the home of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, who apparently led a successful fight to get “everyone” a free education. His wee castle is still stuffed with lace, embroidery and costumes.

So, for a little town, Burnley was already doing well in the fame department long before my sister and I came along. Among its other celebrity citizens, it has a major film star, a whole whack of TV personalities and a soccer club that actually used to be pretty good.

Sir Ian McKellen was born there, but unlike my arrival in a private house, he made his entrance at the general hospital, on May 25, 1939. He’s the old geezer who played Gandalf the wizard in the “Lord of the Rings” films, but back in the ’60s he was already well-known as a member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre Company and later played with skulls and sonnets in the Royal Shakespeare Company. Before Frodo came along he had the title role in the 1995 movie “Richard III” opposite Annette Bening, and was Magneto in 2000’s “X-Men”. The Queen handed him a knighthood in 1991, despite his being an outspoken advocate of gay rights.

The young McKellan did time at Wigan Grammar School for Boys before the family shifted to Bolton down the road, but by then he’d whetted his appetite for acting while watching Wigan Little Theatre do “Twelfth Night” and his big sister hamming it up in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Wigan High School for Girls.

Then there’s Malcolm Hebden, seen here, born in Burnley in 1945 and a recent resident of Worsthorne, who is Norris Cole on “Coronation Street” (and used to be “Carlos”). In the ’60s he paid his dues at Burnley’s Palace Theatre, doing crap like “The Boyfriend”.

From stage and screen to sport. The Burnley Football Club (whose pitch, the 4,000-seat, no-beer-allowed Turf Moor, is just outside Worsthorne on, no kidding, Harry Potts Way) have been around since 1883 and actually won the FA Cup in 1914 and were twice Football League Champs, in 1921 and 1960.

But the Clarets, as they’re called “due to their claret and blue strip”, whatever that means, have been called “one of the most famous clubs to fall from greatness in the last few decades”. After since the 1970s they were outside the top division, and for seven seasons in Fourth Division, before scrabbling back to Division One in 2000. When Steve Cotterill became manager in 2004, they astonished everyone by knocking out Premiership giants Liverpool and Aston Villa, but they still ended up in 13th place in the Championship. That’s the club’s Ali Akbar pictured here.

They had a special guest this past October. Prince Charles again, this time on an anti-racism-through-sport binge, poked his head in at Turf Moor and told everyone to be nice to each other.

Meanwhile, the funky website Knowhere.co.uk asked its readers to list all the famous people from Burnley, and it went like this:

“Phil Neville, the guy from ‘Brookside’ [apparently someone named John McCardle], Alistair Campbell (the nerdy one who lies frequently at government hearings), Gazza (one-time football player), ’70s punk band the Notsensibles, Neil Hodgson of world superbike fame, that Dingle bloke off ‘Emmerdale’ that all the Blackburners think represents the average Burnleyite (damn them), the Michelin Bros who own Michelin and invented the Michelin Man (cool), Peter Pike MP for Burnley (has been caught in nude photos a few times), that chap from the Happy Mondays – Shaun Ryder, Eric Knowells from the antiques roadshow (he went to school and scouts with my dad), that bloody Wayne Hussey from the Mission and Little Stevie Wonder used to live in Bacup.”

Bacup, as I recall, is a tiny hiccup of a Burnley suburb, but a little further afield is a slew of great little villages.
In a hollow by the River Brun, Hurstwood has a collection of 16th-century stone houses, including Spenser’s Cottage, reputed to have been the home in the 1570s of Edmund Spenser, him in the painting, the Elizabethan poet who wrote one of my mum’s favourite ditties, “The Faerie Queene”.

And then of course there’s Worsthorne, where I was born, an historic village associated with the wealthy and generous Thursby family. The extremely old Church of St John the Evangelist gets a surprising amount of attention for its “fascinating wrought-iron work” but, not to be disrespectful in any way, I get a kick out of knowing that my uncle, John Leaver, is buried there. He was a great guy, and we’ll meet him again later.

Out in this countryside trod by the Bronte sisters and the late poet laureate Ted Hughes and his doomed wife Sylvia Plath, birdwatchers have their inevitable sway, shouting quietly at every glimpse of the merlins, peregrines and rare ringed ouzels who make the Pennines one of the most important sites in Europe for feathery conservation.

The birders, gazing upward, frequently collide out on the moors with people who are completely focused on the ground. These are the legions of devotees of Britain’s prehistoric stone structures, and from the chatter on their websites you’d think we’d just made contact with ET. The crop circles may have let their shaved hay grow back, but rock circles aren’t about to be shifted.

Well, maybe some of them. Worsthorne Moor has the Slipper Hill stone circle, above, a ring of five stones out in a farmer’s field, but I’ve been there are I’m telling you honestly there’s not much to look at. My relatives took me out on the moors, which is always fun, but I was expecting Stonehenge and got what looked like rocks randomly buried flat in the dirt. No doubt the farmer had hauled away the more impressive lumps just because they were bloody well in the way.

But the rock fans are nonplussed and keen to speculate at length, offering us uninitiated, by way of “interesting stuff”, standing stones like this one, left, near Worsthorne called the “stump cross”. Circular geek Paul Kenyon says on his website that Slipper Hill was excavated in 1887 and a flint dagger and evidence of cremations were found, “but no sign of anything large enough to resemble a standing stone”.

Also out poking around in the muck of the Pennine range alongside Kenyon and Co are the war historians. The webmaster of one curiously compelling site is staking his reputation, such as it is, on his contention that the rolling hills witnessed “one of the most important battles ever to take place in the British Isles”, the Battle of Brunanburgh in AD 937.

With this noisy clash, he writes, King Athelstan finally put the kybosh on years of annoying raids by the Danes. “Some experts believe this battle took place on the Hurstwood and Worsthorne moorlands above Burnley”, and “Burnley belonged to the King of England”. He even suggests that the dismantled ring of stones nearby could have been a burial chamber and an Iron Age fort that was later occupied by the Romans. The topography was ideal for the hostilities in question, he thinks.

Imagination’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Dominating the landscape near Burnley is Pendle Hill. Thank God no one tried to call it Mount Pendle because it’s only 1,831 feet high, though that was inspirational enough for George Fox, whose had a vision at the “summit” and went on to found the Quaker movement, and for Robert Neill, who wrote of this “brooding” hill in his story “Mist Over Pendle”.

There are spooks in the mist: the Pendle Witches, who’ve been the subject of ghostly sightings and scary stories since 1612, at a time when few people would have guessed that their boom in witchcraft would in future be eclipsed by a booming cottage industry built around the four local women who were hanged on the gallows of Lancaster. Old Chattox, Alice Device, Alison Nutter and Old Mother Demdike: creepy, but funny.

If it’s spirits you want, I can recommended two great pubs in Worsthorne (I think they’re the only two there): the Bay Horse Inn in Church Square and the Crooked Billet on Smith Street, which used to be my dad’s favourite haunt (in keeping with the spirits theme).

Burnley, in enthusiastic contrast, has no fewer that 68 pubs, according to the hard-working editors of Beerintheevening.com, including one called the Coal Clough Hotel in Coal Clough Lane (, seen at left, and rated nine out of 10 by the “members” of Pubutopia.com – phew!), which I mention because my mother’s maiden name was Clough. Clough means “a narrow mountain valley”, apparently, and there are plenty of them around Burnley (even though there are no mountains per se) including a “Love Clough” just to the south and a Clough Bottom not far away.

There’s also the majestic Sparrowhawk Inn, pictured here, one of several upscale “pubs” where I discovered on later visits that all that demeaning talk of horrible British cooking is nonsense. My other cousin Pauline still tucks into the occasional Blood Pudding and Spotted Dick, of course, but I had some truly remarkable suppers that I would swear relied on recipes nicked from the French (but of course you can’t say anything of the sort on the premises).

Still, for all the charms of the taverns and countryside, the focus of all of my visits was Hollins Farm, an ample spread just outside Burnley, across the little River Brun from Worsthorne, and and amply historic enough that it’s marked on most maps all on its own. This was owned by my mother’s sister, Elsie, and her husband John Leaver, and Elsie’s daughter Carolyn is still there with her husband Stephen and their daughters. Stephen has gone to great lengths transforming the farm’s cottage and barn into terrific homes, but no matter how swell they are now, the one immediately adjacent to the main house will always be the “shippen” to me. That’s what they called the stone shed where the cows were kept when Elsie and John were there farming, and in my childhood I was duly amazed to have a couple of head of cattle peering into the living room while we were dining.

I made my first return trip to England in 1957, when I was but four, with my mother and sister. We could ill afford the airfare from Canada, but this was no holiday – my grandmother was dying. I really can’t remember seeing her on that trip (nor ever, for that matter), but I do remember a lovely red plastic violin that someone gave me. Apparently I was quite a sensation greeting one and all with a piquant “Hi!”, which was not the way English people greeted one another in those days. They thought it was adorably cowboyish.

To be sure, I had a cowboy hat, though I’m not sure it survived the journey because my sister Karen, who was six, puked in it on the plane. The full ten gallons, I believe. It was our first time on a plane (we’d gone to Canada by boat), and in 1957 BOAC, as British Airways was then known, was still using incredibly noisy, obsequiously droning propeller airliners, which took about three days to get across the Atlantic, always unable to dodge the incessant storms.

We somehow made it to Edinburgh, arriving in sheets of rain in the middle of the night, and while waiting at the airport for our next hop to Manchester worked on some pieces of unusual toast. How green was my countenance. I have no idea how we managed to board another plane, but I distinctly remember Uncle John picking us up in his milk-delivery lorry and driving us all the way from Manchester to Burnley in an unrelenting downpour. It was one of those trucks where the driver stands up, the better to hop on and off with crates of milk bottles, and I perched on the seat next to him while everyone else was crammed in the back of the van.

The roads seemed to wind tortuously the entire way, quite astonishing for me, having come from the flatness of southern Ontario. Below is an aerial shot showing Worsthorne on the upper bank of the Brun, with Hollins Farm the tiny oasis to the southwest about to be swallowed by two urban jaws.

Then there was the intriguing rite of Guy Fawkes Night. This was November, and the enormous bonfire my cousins lit in honour of the Catholic who tried to blow up the king in his parliament made the occasion as wondrous as any Hallowe’en I’ve seen before or since. No bags of candies, of course, but plenty of homey treats, and leaping flames to chase away the chill.

And the only other thing I remember about that trip was what happened at Toronto airport when we were leaving. I had the window seat on the plane and Mum was trying to point out where Dad was, up on the roof of the terminal waving goodbye to us. I couldn’t pick him out at all, but even if I could have I would have had a hard time seeing him through the tears quietly running down my cheeks.

That happened to me twice again in later years, sitting looking out a window and crying without a sound. The next time was when we were driving into Toronto to the hospital where they’d been trying to keep him going at age 70; we’d just found out he’d died. The other time was when a buddy of mine was driving me to the airport to get on a plane to Asia in 1992. I wasn’t sure when I’d be back and, what the hell, I was going to miss my Mum.

We were the full quartet in 1969 when I next visited England, though – Dad, Mum, Karen and I. It was Dad’s first trip back since emigrating, and needless to say it was a massive family undertaking for the time. I was a terribly cool 16-year-old, and although the Beatles had just broken up I was by then heavily into Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, so there were louder fish to fry, and a decent outside chance of sampling them when we got to London. Carnaby Street was a dayglo blur, the dizzying buzz lightened by the spectacle of my father gaping at a passing beauty in a black satin micro-everything. The hippies were in force and I made up my mind then and there to throw in my lot with them, and get down to some more acid rock forthwith.

Unfortunately, my cousin Carolyn didn’t have quite the same taste in music: she’d scored us tickets to see the Beach Boys at Manchester Free Trade Hall. This was wonderful news for my sister but a bit of balderdash for me. Nevertheless it was a good show. The Wilson brothers and Al Love were at the peak of their creative talent, and the warm-up act was another amusing import from America, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Pure pop but enjoyable, and I was more than rewarded for my perseverence as we were leaving the hall. I spotted some posters on the wall for other Manchester concerts: Pink Floyd! Oh, wait, that was the week before ( got the poster at least – is it great or what?) And then: Led Zeppelin. Yes. In Machester. Same venue. The next weekend.

There was a flurry of calculations, negotiations and calendar consultations. I’d buy the tickets for Karen, Carolyn and younger cousin Karen, who was also with us that night. We’d shift the family itinerary so we could be back up north from London in time.

And so it was that I became the first kid on my block to see the Zeppelin fly. It wasn’t quite as coherent as I’d expected after hearing their first (and at the time only) album, but it was astounding. And loud. I’d never heard anything like it. I turned excitedly to the girls at each damaging decibel to see them leaning well back in their seats completely aghast, and little Karen had her hands firmly locked to her ears … ah, heaven, I thought, and this must be the stairway. But no, that came later.

Meanwhile, back on the farm, Hollins still displayed its own divinity. I was old enough now to appreciate the humble joys of tending cattle, though still silly enough to decline a game of cricket in the yard with Uncle John and cousin David and the farmhands. I was a moody teenager, and among the LPs I’d picked up in the big-city shops were two by the Moody Blues, then in their own little psychedelic period. My aunt had her stereo in a far-flung sitting room of the house and I spent most of the time I was at Hollins in there giving its speakers a workout.

The outdoor magic of Hollins didn’t get a proper grip on me until my next two British holidays, in quick succession in 1989 and 1991. The hikes down the hill from the house to the little creek Brun, with Auntie Elsie’s phalanx of dogs prancing along and goofing about, were never less than magnificent, and I’d get out early too to see the mist roll up. Back in the kitchen with the others just rising I’d have the monstrous Aga stove searing hot for bacon and eggs, and putter through the Daily Express over a huge mug of tea, which always seems to taste better in England. I honestly don’t know why that is.

Besides the Jimmy Page guitar solos and John Bonham inflicting heavy casualties on his drumkit, the absolute highlight of the 1969 trip was seeing the place I was born. I’d really heard nothing about it beyond the name of the village, so I wasn’t at all prepared for The Square. That’s all it’s called. The Square. (And today I live in “The Village”.)

The Square is actually an L-shaped string of attached stone homes, a long, two-storey link. Nothing to do with me, I suppose, but someone put a wagon wheel on the exterior of the address where I made my debut one early August evening at 10.20pm. Dad – who hadn’t even been present for the occasion (he’d gone ahead to Canada to secure my next residence) – took me alone to see the place, and went right up and knocked on the door. The old woman who lived there gave me the once-over yet still quickly agreed to let us in so we could see The Actual Bedroom upstairs.

I don’t recall where Mum was when Dad and I went to see The Square. Perhaps my arrival had been so gruelling that she’d just as soon not revisit the memory. At any rate, I’d seen the beginning, and was ready for the rest.