Pedant mode: they don't say that, they say "It's all grist to the mill".
You're probably right.
The 1863 6” map does not show enough detail. It is just possible that the camp was on the area on the south side of the line east of the bridge. There is not enough detail to tell and this might have been just a spoil tip.
It's the old date of the maps problem again, I think many of us would love to simply pull up a detailed map of any particular year out of a hat, which of course is not possible.
The census details - again you have to be lucky. For me, the 1871 census is almost ideal, I have a list now of 47 workers who have specifically come to build the loop line at Great Harwood and these are my findings:
Of the 47 workers, 61% are English, 26% Irish, and 13% Welsh. The nationalities are mixed when it comes to housing, but not by the type of work they do.
The Labourers live with labourers, navvies with navvies and excavators with excavators. The rations are 3 labourers to every navvy, and two navvies to every excavator. 37 live in the town itself on various streets, and 10 live in wooden huts. The locomotive engine driver and fireman both share a house in town and are both from North Wales.
The wooden huts:
These are very interesting and they are not located where I thought they might be as I was only concentrating of the railway side of things. They are first recorded in the 1841 census, there was at that time only a few huts and housed local people, but by 1871 this has grown into a large community, 1881 still shows them and by 1891 it's all gone.
The town went under a transformation from 1864 onwards as it was cleaned up together with a new dam, housing and some additional cotton mills, all of this required extra labour to undertake the work, hence the huts and in 1871 It would have been a walk of 0.75 miles into town. Close enough to be convenient and far enough away from the town not to cause problems.
The 1871 census location puts these huts in a field North East of the town and I decided to see if they were any traces left. Using the side by side option on the National Library of Scotland site I can see clear traces of a lane, and disturbances in the field even though it's been ploughed many times over the years.
This community had a butcher and even some sort of a pub but no bakery or grocers.
As I've mentioned before, it looks like many growing towns in Britain, from the mid 1800s had these communities of wooden huts. Finding them in the middle of nowhere is a tough one.
Question: If you have a group of people with various skills constructing a viaduct across a river and one goes missing, wouldn't someone know who it is? I have just come across a newspaper report of an unidentified body found under a sleeper at the viaduct works site and yet no one knows who he is?
