Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/333

 from which has grown the Clifton Arms Hotel, whilst the third stood on the site of the Royal Hotel. The roads leading to the hamlet were in such an unfinished state that after heavy falls of rain they could be travelled only with the greatest difficulty, and often with considerable danger both to the vehicle and its occupants; so that under these circumstances most people deemed it more prudent and expedient to perform the journey on horseback, some of them in the pillion fashion usual at that era. In an earlier part of this chapter we spoke of the troubled state of the times and the unsettled and harassed condition of the people as being the most probable causes why Blackpool was so long neglected by many who must have been well cognisant of its beauties in the days of the Tyldesleys, and with equal probability may we now conjecture that the dilapidated and frequently unsafe state of the highways had a serious effect in preventing numbers from visiting the place at this period. Regarding the matter from another point of view, we are led to infer that the four hundred composing the company of 1788, were people who, either in search of health or recreation, had willingly undergone the discomforts of a dreary and sometimes hazardous journey in order to make but a brief sojourn by the shores of Blackpool. Here, then, there is evidence of the great estimation in which the place was held at that early date by the dwellers in the inland towns, and of the rapidity with which its good fame was increasing and extending throughout a large section of the county. As may be naturally supposed, the large influxes of visitors and their turn-outs during the height of the season very much overtaxed the accommodation provided for them by the inhabitants, but that difficulty was easily surmounted by turning the horses loose into a field until their services were again required, whilst the surplus health or pleasure-seekers were lodged in barns or any outbuildings sufficiently protected from the weather. The village possessed two bowling greens of diminutive size, one of which occupied the land at the south-west corner of Lytham Street, whilst the other was in connection with the Yorkshire House, afterwards the York Hotel, and since purchased by a company of gentlemen, who razed it to the ground in order to erect more suitable buildings on the site. There was also a theatre, if that will bear the name which during nine months of the year existed