Excerpt taken from 'Secret Rooms of North West England'
by Winifred I Haward.
Dalesman Publishing Co 1964
From Hoghton, it is worth turning aside to Brindle, two miles away to the south-east, nor because we shall find any hiding places, but because, when Hoghton fell out as a secret centre, Brindle replaced it and became the headquarters of an important mission of an unusual kind. It was a district of scattered hamlets where there was no great house.
Here in 1622 came Father Edmund Arrowsmith to carry on the mission until he met his death in 1628. Arrowsmith House, where he lived for a time, is in the main street of Gregson Lane, once an outlying hamlet of Brindle, but now an industrialised village. It is quite small, a typical yeoman's house, and interesting in having been built round a living tree. To it on the tercentenary of Father Arrowsmith's death came thousands of pilgrims. It is not now occupied, but in fairly good condition, and I was fortunate in meeting someone who had been brought up there.
She told me that a room on the upper floor was traditionally known as the chapel. It had originally been reached by a 'cat ladder' a simple form of staircase once common in small houses. She remembered a piece of iron-work with the sacramental symbols of vine and wheat, which had since been destroyed. She was sure that there had been no hiding place, which confirms the belief that they were not usual in the smaller kind of house. Then she added her own link with the story of Father Arrowsmith .
The news came that the searchers were close at hand when he was at mass in the chapel. He finished the celebration and then fled, carrying altar-slab, chalice and a vestment with him. As the pursuit grew hot, he left these at the house of friends and fled on, but was taken at last in the fields beyond. The altar slab and chalice were later handed over to the church, but the vestment remained where it had been left. Long afterwards, my informant's grandparents came to live there. They gave away small pieces to pilgrims until nothing was left but he lining- and this still remains in the family. She added items which her father had told her...three trees in a garden were the sign of a secret centre, and when the priest was present, or Mass was about to be celebrated, the women would hand their linen upon the trees in a particular way as a signal. There were- or had been-three trees in the garden of the old priest house at Brindle, and there are three at Arrowsmith hose, possible descendents of the originals. I do not know of such a tradition elsewhere, though seven trees in a straight line, denoting the seven Stuart Kings , can sometimes be seen near Jacobite houses in Scotland. In places such as these, where the struggle was carried on by ordinary people and not by the gentry, tradition lives long, and is told in terms that are vivid and moving.