Pilgrim Ways

shrine to the Virgin - and on the road to Pleasington is Hoghton Tower (see above). At Pleasington the pilgrim may visit Pleasington Priory and the ruins of Pleasington Old Hall, which was a Mass Centre in penal times. Nearby is the village of Tockholes, where the graveyard boasts a former Saxon preaching cross, from which the Gospel was proclaimed in Lancashire in 687. Off the road towards Belmont and Bolton there is a rough track which leads to St.Leonard's Well, formerly know as Ladywell.

Stonyhurst To Salmesbury and Fernyhalgh The last of these six suggested forays will take the pilgrim southwest from Stonyhurst towards Preston. In addition to the already mentioned Mass Centres which were secretly used by local Catholics, others operated at Chaigley, Bailey, Osbaldestone, Hothersall, Salesbury, Showley, Wiswell, Bolton, Clayton, Dunkenhalgh, and Samlesbury Upper Hall and Samlesbury Lower Hall. The martyr, John Southworth, was born at Samlesbury (see Chapter Sixteen, Westminster Cathedral) and over the large fireplace there is a carving of his head.

The chapel still exists and over the priest's room is a hiding hole. The armorial bearings of the Southworths may be seen in the nave of the nearby St.Leonard's Church. The Catholic Church of St.Mary built in 1818 is also in the same vicinity. A short journey leads to the shrine of Our Lady of Fernyhalgh (see Chapter Six, Marian Shrines). The name is thought to mean "ancient shrine" or "ancient saint" and, like Marsden's Well, near Samlesbury, is thought to have been used for baptisms in Saxon times. Access to Ladyewell is by foot. The well is about half a mile away from Fernyhalgh Church (where, in the sanctuary, Our Lady of Fernyhalgh is depicted holding the Christ Child). Ladyewell House has been developed as a pilgrimage centre, with seats, an outside altar, and Rosary Way. In a modern chapel each of the names of the Catholic martyrs is inscribed on a role call, the names themselves a reminder that the same faith was once held by all the people of these islands. Like the ancient pilgrims who recited the Jesus Psalter and had a great love of the Virgin, today's pilgrims will find peace here.

Liverpool And Irish Influences The ancient faith celebrated at Fernyhalgh refused to die despite the war of attrition that sought to destroy it. Thanks to the heroic labours of the Jesuit priests and the Lancashire faithful (after the restoration of the English Hierarchy, in 1850), the 1851 census showed that Lancashire was still the most Catholic County in England: 102,812 (42%) of 241,000 Catholics living there. By 1910 the Catholic population in Lancashire had increased sixfold, and at the heart of the influx of new Catholics was Liverpool and the Irish immigrant community (although the Irish also settled in many other parts of the county). As the Catholic pilgrim journeys into a city which had been forged on the back of the slave trade and populated by the forced exodus from the Irish Famine (see Chapter Eleven, Knock), a good starting point in the journey is Liverpool's Maritime Museum, which graphically tells the story of those double tragedies.

St.Patrick's, Dingle Not far away, in the Dingle, is St.Patrick's Catholic Church. The Park Lane church was one of the first churches which I visited when I first went to Liverpool as a student in 1969. I had some teaching experience in the parish school, which in those days was housed in a former Victorian warehouse. It was explained to me that the church was one of the very last to be built before the Emancipation of Catholics in 1829 and had, therefore, to be constructed in