Cobbles at Park Bridge

As a child I remember walking alongside the cobbled streets of Oldham. Some streets had been roughly covered in tarmac and I could still see the cobbles and tram lines beneath.

At Park Bridge the road still has its original cobbles. The steel works which served the mills and supported the industrial revolution here has long since gone. Park Bridge Ironworks; gone. Fairbottom Colliery; gone. The steam-powered engine pumping water from the coal pit in Fairbottom Bobs; gone. Park Bridge Ironworks was operated for two hundred years by the Lees family. They made the rivets for the Eiffel Tower and the Titanic. It finally closed in 1963 and became a ruin in the 1970s without the buildings ever being recorded or appreciated.

The cobbles remain.

They knew how to build roads then.