Place:Haigh, Lancashire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Since 1974 Haigh has been a village and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan in Greater Manchester, England. Prior to 1974 it was a part Wigan Rural District in Lancashire. It is located next to the parish of Aspull in the eastern section of the rural district. The western boundary is the River Douglas which separates the township from the Wigan urban area. To the north a small brook running into the Douglas divides it from Blackrod. At the 2001 census it had a population of 594, a far cry from the 5,461 reported for the chapelry (including Aspull) in 1871. Haigh was originally a township and chapelry in the ancient parish of Wigan. It became an independent civil parish in 1866 and part of Wigan Rural District in 1894. [edit] History the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia Haigh is derived from the Old English haga, a hedge and means "the enclosure". The township was variously recorded as Hage in 1193, Hagh in 1298, and Haghe, Ha and Haw in the 16th century.

Manor

Wikipedia relates the ownership of the Manor of Haigh from the early 13th century through to 1947 mentioning Hugh le Norreys, Mabel le Norreys; William Bradshagh; Peter de Limesey; John de Bradsagh, his son William; Richard de Bradsagh or Bradsaigh, his son Roger; Sir Henry de Trafford; Edward Bradshaigh; Sir Roger Bradshaigh, 1st Baronet, MP; Elizabeth Dalrymple; Alexander Lindsay, 6th Earl of Balcarres; the Earls of Crawford or the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres; James Lindsay, the 7th Earl Balcarres; James Lindsay, the 9th Earl Balcarres; and David Lindsay, the 11th Earl Balcarres.

(Wikipedia gives the source as A description of the township of Haigh from the Victoria County History of Lancashire provided online by British History Online.)

Coal

In 1540 John Leland reported that Sir Roger Bradshaigh had discovered a seam of cannel coal on his estate which could be burnt or carved by hand or machine into ornaments. It was an excellent fuel, easily lit, burned with a bright flame and left virtually no ash. It was widely used for domestic lighting in the early 19th century before the incandescent gas mantle was available but lost favour when coal gas made it obsolete. The cannel coal was mined from Tudor times but by the mid-1600s the mines were wet and had started flooding. To remedy this, between 1653 and 1670, Sir Roger Bradshaw built a sough or adit: the Great Haigh Sough, which ran for about a mile under his estate. It still drains water from the ancient workings. The Bradshaws successors, the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres, founded the Wigan Coal and Iron Company in 1865. Collieries in Haigh belonging the Wigan Coal and Iron Company in 1896 were the Alexandra, Bawkhouse, Bridge, Lindsay and Meadow Pits.

The central workshops for Balcarres' collieries in Haigh and neighbouring Aspull were built on the north bank of the canal between 1839 and 1841. The forge, smithy, joinery and fitting shops were powered by a steam engine. The site became the sawmill for the Wigan Coal and Iron Company's pits and Kirkless Iron and Steel Works. The Georgian office block survives.

Haigh Foundry

Haigh Foundry was opened in the steep-sided Douglas valley in 1788 by the 6th earl, his brother and Mr Corbett an iron founder from Wigan. It was an iron works producing pig iron and castings. Brock Mill Forge, of even earlier origins, was acquired. From 1808, the firm manufactured winding engines and pumps for the mining industry. In 1812, it built Lancashire's first locomotive and two more by 1816. In 1835 E. Evans and T.C. Ryley took a 21-year lease. They built a series of more than 100 locomotives for use in transporting coal and for use in the Crimean War before 1856.

In 1848, Haigh produced a beam engine of 100 inch bore by 12 feet stroke, possibly the largest in the world at that time. During the same decade, it supplied massive swing bridges for the Albert Dock in Liverpool and for Hull Docks in Hull, Yorkshire - both still in existence in 2011.

Until 1860, castings had to be carted up the hill out of the valley and records exist of at least 48 horses being hired from farmers to move a single casting. A railway was built but was re-routed a few years later. The foundry lease was given up in 1884 and the works closed in 1885. Several of Haigh's engineers left to form engine building companies - Walker Brothers, Ince Forge and Worsley Mesnes Ironworks Ltd.

Much of the site, with the exception of Brock Mill Forge, was intact in 2011 and the route of the mineral railway, including four bridges, is little changed. The foundry has been demolished but the site is used for manufacturing. The cast iron gateposts remain and a four storey building and chimney by the River Douglas. The foundry drawing office was on Wingates Road in a building with large windows and a stone floor supported by cast iron columns.

Research Tips

• See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
• Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
• Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
• Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
• FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
• Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
• A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
• GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
• The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
• A description of the township of Haigh from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911