IT’S the fifth Thursday of the month and that means the focus is on the history of a township. This time it is Haydock, and no, I stlll don’t know why its people are called Yickers.

In the Sankey Valley Visitors Centre, there is a stone with markings relating to the Bronze Age, and there is evidence that some roads date to pre-Roman times.

When the Romans built a major centre at Chester, they built a road to Warrington where they built a causeway across the marshy south side to where they could safely ford the river, and they built a road that went through Newton, Wigan and northward to the Walls.

Wilderspool seems to have grown as a trading area and some of the ancient tracks suggest the local inhabitants had routes to this main artery where they could cart smelted iron north and south for trading.

The Clipsey Brook evolved into the boundary with Garswood, and the Sankey Brook with the south west.

The clay soil was particularly suited for the farmers to produce oats, wheat, potatoes, and cabbages. The word Haydock is Celtic for where barley is growing.

Now fans of the Humphrey Bogart film “The Maltese Falcon”, (and one of my great moments was to stand by its display case in the Warner Brothers studio in Hollywood), will know that The Knights of Hospitaller were Knights of the Order of Saint John.

The Hospitallers grew out of a brotherhood for the care of sick pilgrims in a hospital at Jerusalem following the First Crusade in 1100 AD.

Well, the Gentry of the manor of Haydock took that surname and in 1168, Orm de Haydock, who had married the king's daughter (Henry II), granted land called Cayley to the Hospitallers.

By 1540 the estate was held by Guy Holland, the Holland family having other estates in the same part of Haydock, and their deeds say the bounds of Cayley began “where Kemesley Clough fell into the Sankey and going across outside the hedge of Cayley to Clippesley Brook and Blackbrook, then up Sankey to the starting point.”

The Hospitallers held land “now called Leafog or LAFFOG” (then in Parr) which they granted to Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal and William his son. On the latter's death in 1570 it was granted by Queen Elizabeth to John Dudley, from whom Thomas Norris of Orford acquired it.

There were two major national stories in the 1300s with local repercussions.

In 1315 the Banastre Rebellion took place, a fighting force from Standish besieging Liverpool Castle (failed) and Halton Castle (succeeded) before being beaten near Manchester. They plundered lands in Haydock because the Haydock family were supporters of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.

The other happened in 1347. John De Dalton was the son of Robert De Dalton, a large landowner in Lancashire.

On Good Friday, April 7, 1347, before dawn, John De Dalton and 64 lawless friends broke into the Castle of Beaumys and carried off Margery, Lady De La Beche, and many other prisoners, killing three others.

The king issued a writ to the Sheriff of Lancashire to arrest John De Dalton and all his accomplices and commit them to the Tower of London.

Sir Matthew de Haydock was taken, Gilbert de Haydock was also charged, but pardoned soon afterwards on the king being assured that he was 'wholly guiltless’.

Three years earlier, 1344, that same Gilbert was given leave “to make a park in Haydock”. In 1898 Lord Newton leased 127 acres of that land to build the racecourse as it stands now, and the racing at Newton Common moved to Haydock Park.

Of Sir Gilbert's children the heir was his daughter Joan, who carried this and other manors to the family of her first husband, Peter de Legh of Lyme in Cheshire.

The manor has since remained a part of the Legh inheritance.

I am sure many of you are familiar with Lyme Hall in Lyme Park in Cheshire. That land was granted to Sir Thomas Danyers in 1346 by Edward III for his service to the Black Prince in the Battle of Crecy. On Sir Thomas's death the estate passed to his daughter, Margaret, who in 1388 married the first Piers Legh.

So the Legh family have been acquiring lands in Newton and Haydock and other areas for over seven hundred years.

Saint Edmund Arrowsmith, one of the Forty Martyrs, was born in Haydock in 1585. He was the son of Robert Arrowsmith, a yeoman farmer, and Margery Gerard, a member of an important local Catholic family.

The family was constantly harassed for its adherence to Roman Catholicism.

Edmund was executed at Lancaster in 1628 for the crime of being a priest. He asked for his hand to be cut off before he died, and “The Holy Hand” is kept at St. Oswald’s in Ashton.

Thurstan Arrowsmith, the grandfather, died in Salford gaol in 1583 as a recusant (refusing to attend services of the Church of England.) Katherine Arrowsmith, a leaseholder under Sir Peter Legh, had two-thirds of her tenement sequestered by the Commonwealth authorities for her recusancy.

Thurstan her son, 'a Protestant and conformable,' claimed it in 1652, and it was allowed him on his taking the oath of abjuration. Thurstan Callan and Mary his mother, widow of William Callan, in 1717 known as 'papists' registered their estate in the house called Blackbrook.

Blackbrook Hall is mentioned in 1684, and other Halls in the area were Piele Hall, Bruche Hall, and Haydock Hall.

The arrival of the Sankey Canal meant that coal could now be exported to Liverpool and the Cheshire salt fields, and Haydock grew as a colliery town.

The major mine owners were the Evans family, who had bought the pits from the Legh family in 1833.

Richard Evans built a foundry to construct what the collieries needed, including steam locomotives like “Bellerophon”, which has featured on TV and video. They lived in The Heyes and The Grange.

The Liverpool, St Helens and South Lancashire Railway had stations at Central, Haydock, Ashton in Makerfield, and Haydock Park. There was a major electric tramway/trolley bus service along what, in my youth, was called “the longest village in England”.

In 1931 work began on the Haydock War Memorial, on land donated by Lord Newton of the Legh family. It took the form of a free library and gardens with a memorial tablet to the memory of the soldiers from Haydock who fell in the Great War. Sadly, the tablet has disappeared.

Music is a current part of life, with the Haydock Male Voice Choir, Valley Brass, the Easy Street Big Band at Blackbrook, and many bygone bands such as Redgate Boys. Bygone cinemas were the Electraceum and the Picturedrome (“Bug”).

Strange tales concern an Irish navvy ghost and the headless spirit of Old Moll Bolton, both reputed to haunt the Blackbrook area, and Red Clogs, a gremlin-like image spotted around old pit workings on the Haydock-Earlestown border.