When I first visited the locality I was much amused at the rough and ready way in which some of the country people accounted for their construction, or rather the object thereof. They had seen sheep, when the Ribble valley was flooded, mount on the top of them for safety, and they innocently concluded that these historic monuments, mementoes of deadly civil strife during the eighth century, or of the glacial period of geologists, had been erected by some benevolent or thrifty ancestor of the owner of the soil for the especial accommodation of ovine refugees during the deluges to which the low-lying land on the margin of the river is occasionally subjected.
It is, of course, at the present time, impossible to define the extent of ground covered by the contending armies during the conflict, or to give even a satisfactory outline of the general features of the battle. The Roman road, the seventh iter of Richard of Cirencester, which leads from the Wyre (the Portus Setantiorum of Ptolemy), by Preston and Ribchester to York, passed through the township of Billington, crossed the Calder near the present "Potter's Ford," a little above its junction with the Ribble, and proceeded a little south of Clitheroe and north of Pendle-hill, by Standen Hall, and Worston, in Lancashire, and Downham, into Yorkshire. Mr. Abram seems to think that the battle was most probably fought on this line of road. He says--"Eardulf encountered the insurgent army on the extreme verge of his kingdom (for it seems certain that the country south of the Ribble was then a part, not of the Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, but that of Mercia). Wada and his army had probably been driven upon the neutral territory before the decisive battle could be forced upon him."
This notion that the Ribble and not the Mersey was the southern boundary of Northumbria in the earlier period of the Heptarchy, was first propounded by Dr. Whitaker, but upon very slight evidence. It is sufficient here to say that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the date 923, expressly states that King Edward sent a force of Mercians to take possession of "Mameceastre (Manchester), _in Northumbria_, and repair and man it." Again, the same chronicle, when referring to this very battle, A.D. 798, expressly states that it took place "at Whalley, _in the land of the Northumbrians_." Against such evidence, Dr. Whitaker's mistaken dialectal argument, as well as that based on the extent of the episcopal see of Lichfield, at some period of the Heptarchy, is utterly valueless. His authority is the ancient document entitled "De Statu Blackborneshire," supposed to have been written in the fourteenth century by John Lindeley, Abbot of Whalley. Some notion of the value of this monkish compilation, with reference to the earlier history of the district, may be gathered from the fact that the author makes Augustine, and not Paulinus, the missionary who planted Christianity amongst the Northumbrian Angles. Dr. Whitaker likewise contends that the Ribble is the _dialectic_ boundary between the two kingdoms. My own observation, however, leads me to a very different conclusion. To my ear the change is by no means so distinctly marked on the north and south sides of the Ribble as it is on the north and south banks of the Mersey. The swampy country between the two rivers would rather seem to have been a kind of "march" or "debateable ground," during the earlier portion of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish periods, districts in it being sometimes governed by tributary British chieftains under both Northumbrian and Mercian kings as the fortune of war from time to time prevailed. Lancashire is not referred to as a county till the middle of the twelfth century. The name is never mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As we find the "Lands between the Ribble and the Mersey" are surveyed with those of Cheshire, in the Domesday book, it seems highly probable that they formed a part of Leofric's earldom of Mercia, at the time of the Norman conquest. Consequently it is to the latter and not to the earlier portion of the Anglo-Saxon period that the Ribble formed the southern boundary of the _earldom_ of Northumbria, rather than of the earlier independent _kingdom_.