The lonesome moor where Cromwell routed Sir Marmaduke Langdale and his Royalists has become an open space for the recreation of the people; the Jacobite rebellions and the temporary sojourn of Charles Edward on that disastrous Derby campaign are remembrances dimmed by the remarkable rise of Preston in modern times as a manufacturing and commercial town. This is owing to its position at the head of the Ribble estuary. There are two things in the present century of which even "Proud Preston" need not be ashamed: it was here that the first total abstinence pledge was taken in England, the signatories being Joseph Livesey and half a dozen brother-abstainers; and it was here that the practical working of the vote by ballot was tested in 1872.
For more than thirty years the flourishing town, standing 120 feet above its river, has been undergoing improvements, carried out with great public spirit. Sir Gilbert Scott designed for it the French-Gothic Town Hall which rises gracefully above the other buildings; County Hall, Free Library, and Museum have been added; even the parish church has been rebuilt, and the once steepleless town now boasts, in St. Walburge's Roman Catholic Church, the loftiest spire erected in England since the Reformation. An unbroken link with the past is the Guild-Merchants' Festival, celebrated since 1397 (half a century before the first charter was granted); and for the last 400 years the "Preston Guild" has been observed with intense fervour every twenty years, the next coming due in 1902. The present writer was in Preston during, probably, the saddest circumstances under which such a celebration could occur. It was in 1862, when the cotton famine was sore in Lancashire; but the Prestonians threw themselves with energy into the traditional observance, and made it a memorable success. Rose festivals, morris dances, and other old English revelries retain their hold here, as in other parts of Lancashire, and are likely long to prevail.
It is as a port that Preston has recently claimed attention. The changes effected since the passing of the Ribble Navigation Act in 1883 have been striking. The marsh which kept the town apart from its river has been drained, and made fit for houses and streets. Woods that were familiar objects in the immediate landscape have disappeared, and the deepening of the channel of the tidal Ribble to admit ships of 1,700 tons has been but a natural result of Arkwright and his spinning-frame, and the cotton industry that superseded the linen-making of the previous century. The new dock, opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1892, with the Corporation as its owners, cost a million of money. The scheme made it necessary to divert the course of the Ribble below the town, and the prediction of the eminent engineer, Sir John Coode, that there would be no port in the country with so free a run to the sea, has been fulfilled. Even with the construction of docks, involving three miles' length of permanent railway sidings, the old charm of the scene is not entirely lost. The brawny shoulders of Longridge Fell may be discerned in the north-east; cattle and sheep graze on the levels; the borders of the Fylde country are in view, and abrupt Rivington Pike is on the remote horizon.