Where is this place in Colne?

[arthurk]

To the West of Waterside, there is a small settlement called "The Ing". Maybe the Locals just referred to ithe general area as 'Ingon'. The general area also includes Ing Lock, Ing Lockhouse and Ing Bridge.

It took me a while to spot that - it's over the boundary in Barrowford, and the lock etc is on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

'Ing' is a mainly north country word meaning meadow or pasture, especially close to a river or stream, and it's a common element in place names - see Joseph Wright's Dialect Dictionary:

https://archive.org/details/englishdialectdi03wrig/page/318/mode/2up

It seems very unlikely to me that anyone local would call it anything but Ing (or possibly Ings), and Wright provides no evidence of a derivative form such as 'Ingon'. Besides which, none of this accounts for the very clear 'Engine' in the parish register.

[Sandblown]

It seems strange, to Me, how "Engine" in the Parish Record, became "Ingon" in the Bishop's Transcript. Unless the Parish Minister had very bad handwriting, when compiling the Transcript, how or why was it changed ? Did the Minister change it, based on an afterthought, through Local Knowledge ?

[Gadget]

Is there any chance of seeing the entry in the Parish register?

[arthurk]

Sorry for the delay - I'd switched off by the time the last two messages were posted. Below is a composite image showing the PR and BT entries, also the word in question blown up.

I've also done a bit more digging - Wikipedia has this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colne (last part of History section) :

Colne is on the edge of the Burnley Coalfield and coal was being mined at Fox Clough, to south of the town, from the early 17th century. Fox Clough Colliery also known as Engine Pit, was started by the Executors of John Hargreaves company, probably around 1832.

'The Annals of Trawden Forest' by Fred Bannister is mainly about the neighbouring Trawden area, but includes the following in a chapter on coal mining at https://archive.org/details/annalsoftrawdenf00bann/page/28/mode/2up:

Several shafts near Carry Heys and "The Old Engine" were worked at an earlier date than those of Fox Clough and Lark Hill.

All of which suggests to me that in the late 18th century there was a mine with an engine (stationary, steam) which gave its name to the surrounding area. Quite how the word came to be spelled differently in the PR and BT may remain a mystery; however, as both documents appear to have been written up all in one go, I wonder if there was a rough original record which one person read out, while a second wrote up the PR and a third the BT - and the third person's spelling was unconventional.

[Gadget]

I've been thinking about the Ingon, Arthur. Some of my grandfather's mining buddies would have pronounce Engine as In-jun or In-gun (with a soft g). Could that be the reason for the spelling in the BTs?

Though why on earth a place would be called Engine, I'm not sure !

[arthurk]

The OED has maybe 20-30 historic and/or regional variant spellings of engine, about half of which begin with 'i', and it had occurred to me that it might sometimes be pronounced 'injun'.

I actually lived in Colne for a few years in the 1980s, but I'm struggling to imagine how it might have been pronounced then. My best thought is that some people could have said it like that, but it probably varied from one person to another. And of course that was nearly 200 years after these entries were written, so even if I could remember clearly, it wouldn't necessarily prove much.

I think it would have been called Engine because of the strange newfangled contraption that someone installed at a pit. If it was the first or only one in the area, "ower thurr" could easily become "by th'engine".

[Gadget]

... and when  they were writing up the BTs from the PRs, did one 'scribe' call our Injun/Injon and it was written down thus!

[Drosybont]

Some nice pictures of the Fox Clough engine house in a valley just south of Colne here:

https://backthenwhen.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/fox-clough-steam-engine-house/

Said to have been built between the 1780s and 1805.

Drosybont

[arthurk]

Thanks for that, Drosybont. If I still lived there I'd be out like a shot to have a look for myself, but at the time I knew nothing about it.