Place:Easington (Bowland Forest), West Riding of Yorkshire, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this article is based on one in Wikipedia

Easington (Bowland Forest) is now a civil parish within the Ribble Valley District of Lancashire, England. Between 1894 and 1974, it formed part of Bowland Rural District in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Historically, Easington was in the ecclesiastical parish of Slaidburn in Staincliffe and Ewcross Wapentake.

Its population in 2001 (UK census) was just 52. The 2011 UK census population details have been grouped with those for Slaidburn. It covers over 9000 acres.

Reference is made below to the settlement of Dale Head (also known as Stocks in Bowland), the location of a large 20th century reservoir. The two names have been redirected here. In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Stocks in Bowland like this:

"DALE-HEAD, a chapelry in Slaidburn parish, [West Riding of] Yorkshire; 6 miles NN W of Chatburn [railway] station, and 7½ N by W of Clitheroe. Post town, Slaidburn, under Blackburn. Statistics, with the parish. The living is a [perpetual] curacy, annexed to the rectory of Slaidburn, in the diocese of Ripon. The church is very good."

(Source:A Vision of Britain through Time)

Governance

The civil parish of Easington was created from the township of the same name in 1866. In 1938, the geographically non-contiguous lower division was transferred to Newton in Bowland. Easington has shared a parish council with Slaidburn since 1976.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Near Brown Hills Beck on the eastern border of the parish is a bowl barrow thought to date from the late Neolithic or Bronze Age periods. It is an oval mound of earth, wide and up to high. There is another similar mound on the opposite side of the stream in Gisburn Forest.

Part of the Forest of Bowland, the historic township had two divisions—Lower and Upper Easington—which are geographically non-contiguous. Mystery surrounds the origin of these two divisions.

From Norman times, Lower Easington formed part of the Liberty of Bowland, being a possession of the Lords of Bowland. Its manor was subinfeuded and by the thirteenth century was held by the De Wannervill family. Ownership passed to the Bannister family in the early sixteenth century, with the manor eventually being broken up and sold off piecemeal in the 1690s. The manor sat due south of Slaidburn within the modern-day township of Newton-in-Bowland.

Upper Easington is the larger of the two divisions and includes Dalehead and Stocks Reservoir. It abuts Gisburn Forest and marks the easternmost extent of ancient Bowland. To the north of Upper Easington sits the Cross o'Greet, the ancient boundary point and watershed between the medieval lordships of Bowland and Burton-in-Lonsdale, Clitheroe and Hornby; the route up to the Cross across what was anciently called "Gradale" is perhaps one of the most ruggedly beautiful in the Forest.

It is thought that the lands of Upper Easington may originally have been part of the Slaidburn township but grants by the de Lacys to Kirkstall Abbey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave the area its own distinctive identity. The township of Rushton was granted by Robert de Lacy, 3rd Lord of Bowland, in 1180. This was to be the site of the area's monastic grange (now submerged beneath Stocks Reservoir). In 1220 or thereabouts, John de Lacy, 5th Lord of Bowland, granted an area west of the Hodder and north of Rushton known as "Gamellesarges". In Helen Wallbank's unpublished translation from the Latin, the description of Upper Easington from the grant of 1232–40 reads:

Gradalehals is the 'grey dale' at the head of Cross o'Greet; Kesedene is Keasden Brook; Rowenumcnothes is Bowland Knotts; Hesbrithehawebroc is Hesberts Hill Brook (now known as Brown Hills Beck and, lower down, Dob Dale Beck); Thirnesetegilebroc is now known as Bottoms Beck, but was formerly known as Bridge House Beck, all these becks being names for the same beck at different locations.

For three centuries, Upper Easington remained Kirkstall Abbey's most westerly land holding before being forfeited by the Abbey in 1539. After the Reformation, Rushton Grange was acquired by the Braddyll family of Whalley and thereafter by the Johnson and Wiglesworth families. The Wiglesworths later built their imposing mansion, Townhead, in Slaidburn. Charles Towneley, 13th Lord of Bowland, acquired the grange in 1860 before its eventual sale to the Fylde Reservoir Company.

The mesne manor of Hammerton also lay within Upper Easington until the time of the Reformation when the Hammerton family lands were confiscated by the Crown. The manor was later held by the Greenacres and Breres families.

Historians continue to puzzle over the existence of two Easingtons. The Coucher Book of Kirkstall Abbey suggests the lands of the upper Hodder north of Slaidburn were not known as Easington in the thirteenth century, merely as "Bouland". We might speculate that the manor of Lower Easington gained some influence over the area after the Reformation, with the civil administrative map being redrawn to reflect this change, perhaps during the seventeenth century. However, the evidence for this is slight, although a junior branch of the Bannister family was present at Newhouse, south of Catlow, from the early 1600s.

In 2009, a rare limeburners' clamp kiln was excavated at Halsteads in Upper Easington which carbon dating suggests was last fired somewhere between 1205 and 1280. This approximates to the period in the thirteenth century when John de Lacy, 5th Lord of Bowland, gifted his lands to Kirkstall.^[1]

There is evidence of prehistoric settlement in Lower Easington: with Skelshaw Ring, a Bronze Age monument, lying due south of Slaidburn.

Research Tips

• GENUKI on Easington. The GENUKI page gives numerous references to local bodies providing genealogical assistance.
• The FamilySearch wiki on the ecclesiastical parish of Slaidburn provides a list of useful resources for the local area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Easington.
• A Vision of Britain through Time on Bowland Rural District. This section provides statistics on population and industry, as well as a listing of the civil parishes and the alterations to the municipal organization.
• A map of the West Riding of Yorkshire circa 1888 (before the existence of rural and urban districts) supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time
• A map of the southern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire circa 1931 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time
• A map of the northern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire circa 1931 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time (Bowland Rural Districts is divided in half horizontally between these two maps.)