Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/449

 for the choir, was converted into commodious sitting accommodation for the congregation. During the same year half an acre was added to the north of the burial ground, and a fresh boundary wall, facing Church Road completed, the iron work being given by the late John Stevenson, J.P., of West Beach, and the stone work by the late John Knowles, proprietor of the Clifton Arms Hotel. The tower contains a peal of eight bells. John Talbot Clifton, esq., of Lytham Hall, is the patron of the living. The parish register begins in 1679.

The churchyard, which is encircled by a thick plantation of trees, possesses many very handsome monuments, but none of historical importance. The oldest gravestone still legible lies in close proximity to the ancient sun-dial, and bears the date 1672. The parish schools, erected in 1853, stand in Church Road.

Dodsworth informs us that in the neighbourhood of Lytham there existed, in 1601, a village called Waddum Thorp, and that eleven years previously the Horsebank was a green pasture for cattle. Dr. Leigh affirms that the hamlet in question was peopled by some Saxon fishermen. The locality alluded to in the foundation document as Snartsalte is now denominated Saltcoats, and was, like several neighbouring places, the site of a salt manufactory in remote days. Geoffrey Gillet worked the Saltcoats manufactory. Cambden in describing the extractive process says:—"They pour water from time to time upon heaps of sand till it grows brackish, and then with a turf fire they boil it into a white salt." Bowden wrote, in 1722, concerning the same subject:—On many places on the coast the inhabitants gather heaps of sand together which, having lain some time, they put into troughs full of holes at the bottom, pour water upon them, and boil the lees into white salt."

About 1800 the hamlet comprised several mud and thatch cottages, interspersed here and there with a fair number of habitations of recent origin, built with bricks and slated. There were also two inns in existence, the Wheat Sheaf and the Clifton Arms, besides two small licensed houses. The Wheat Sheaf was erected in Clifton Street during the year 1794, and almost simultaneously, but a little later, the Clifton Arms arose on the opposite side of the thoroughfare, facing the sea. There were several shops in the village, and in Douglas Street a house of confinement, con