Well, you can't have a liminal place without a bit of mystery, can you?
The West Pennine Moors are a wild, and windswept, part of the Pennines near Manchester. Their natural beauty is possibly not as dramatic as the Yorkshire Dales to the north, and the Peak District to the south, although they are wild enough in places, but they make up for it with their human story, especially the mysteries.
Take Tockholes, for example, a small village near Blackburn. Something grisly happened here in the Civil War, but what exactly is a mystery. Less mysterious, and also less bloody, was the conflict over the construction of the M65 motorway through Stanworth valley. They lost, but nearby Darwen Tower commemorates a victory by an earlier generation of eco-warriors over access to the moor.
Then there is Hollinshead Hall.
The hall stands in woodland on the edge of the edge of the moors. The obvious reason for it being called 'Hollinshead Hall', would be that it was the home of Hollinshead family. However whilst the Hollinshead family did ev.entually end up living there, the hall was more than 400 years old by this stage, so the name clearly came form somewhere else.
The hall itself has not been lived in since the middle of the nineteenth century, and has pretty much ceased to exist apart from its foundations, with the stone half-inched by the local villagers. However the Well House survives, and indeed looks pretty spruce and well cared for.
Records of a belief that the water had healing properties goes back to at least 1877, although the finding in the 1970s of a hoard of medieval coins, possibly an offering, suggests the place has been venerated for a lot longer. I guess don't just let your local healing well fall into ruin, though by what mechanism this building was saved whilst the rest crumbled I do not know.
There are a number of ghost stories associated with well although most, like the account of the traveller who spent the night in the well house and was accosted by a series of spectral entities, are so poorly documented to be almost worthless. In says past when the car park was open I spent the night here in the back of a transit van, and nothing happened to me.
In the even more distant past the Well House was also open to the public, and so I have drunk from it. I wasn't cured, but then I wasn't ill. Today though you can only look at the water through the barred windows. Someone will have a key, but I don't know who.
The absence of any real facts about the Well House, and the demise of the hall that gave it some context, leaves us with a true liminal place, one where the imagination takes over where reality ends. The moors, the trees and water coming from the lion's mouth are all real enough, but meaning, purpose and truth can only be found in the realm of the imagination.
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