Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/339

 a disastrous result seems at length to have been realised by the landlords themselves, who discovered that the plan to enlarge their own business was not to drive visitors away from the place by limiting the accommodation, but to offer them every inducement to come, and to have a sufficiency of houses ready to receive them when they had arrived. Under this new and more liberal impression greater facilities were offered both to purchasers of land and builders, so that the early error into which they had fallen was rectified before any great amount of harm had been done.

During the summer of 1808 the Preston volunteers were on duty at Blackpool for two weeks, and on the 4th of June celebrated the seventieth birthday of His Majesty George III. with many demonstrations of loyalty and rejoicing.

The small town now boasted five good class hotels, which, in their order from north to south, were named Dickson's, Forshaw's, Bank's, Simpson's, and the Yorkshire House. Simpson's, formerly Hull's, is now the Royal Hotel; Bank's the Land Ends Hotel, and Dickson's was the one already mentioned as Bailey's Hotel. "Adjoining Forshaw's Hotel," writes a gentleman who visited Blackpool about that date; "there are two or three houses of genteel appearance, compared with the many small cottages leading thence to the street, which is the principal entrance from Preston. There is a promenade with an arbour at the end of it, and beyond it nearer to Dixon's Hotel stands a cottage used as a warm bath. Beyond Dixon's there is a public road where two four-wheeled vehicles can pass each other." At a later period both the road and cottage alluded to had succumbed to the unchecked power of the advancing sea; and here it will be convenient to mention other and much more serious encroachments made by the same element in the course of years now long gone by. We can scarcely conceive, when gazing on the indolent deep in its placid mood, that at any time it could have been possessed with such a demon of fury and destruction as to swallow up broad fields, acres upon acres, of the foreland of the Fylde, and in its blind anger sweep away whole villages, levelling the house walls and uprooting the very foundations, so that no trace or vestige of their former existence should remain. History, however, points to a hamlet called Waddum Thorp, which once stood off the coast of Lytham, fenced from the sea by a broad area