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well i would assume it was cos it looks as if it runs into church grounds

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:s_gupjump Well there you go then. I said St. Peter's right at the beginning. lol

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Hooray! Mez gets the coconut.

It is the rear gate of the house that is opposite Willow Mount WMC. Is it called Willow Mount too? I can't remember. I do know it became an old folks home for a while and then it was burnt out. Behind the gate on the right there is a coach house. Anybody know who the house was built for?

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Is this the one that used to be the vicarage? Or the other one?

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The other one. The Vicarage is on Perth Street, but this too is an old folks home.

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Well fancy that! All these years I thought that gate was part of the church grounds. I should go exploring a bit more often.

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wasn't that were dr chesney lived? im sure they lived round there?

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It's a lovely big house. Presumably whoever lived there as a private residence must have had a bob or two.

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I've just been down there having a look. It's a terrible mess isn't it? Anyway, didn't see a name anywhere but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I do have a feeling at one time one of those two houses was called Willow Mount Nursing Home or something like that. From the back (the gate in Rowland St) it looks as if the whole area could at one tiome have been enclosed by the same wall (church, vicarage and this other house) - did all the land belong to the church at one time? Could the house have had a church connection? A church school maybe? I'd love to know if anyone knows the history of that little bit.

I do know at one time the houses in Willows Lane were numbered differently on that side and that some time after 1900 some of the houses were re-numbered - ie the one at the junction with Ormerod St was originally 127 but is now 129. It had to be after 1900 because that particular block was built in 1900.

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Well here is an interesting little snippet from the 1891 OSmap. You will note that there is no Vicarage and that Rowland Street cuts into the garden. What do we make of this?

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I've got to find a recent map to compare to that A-b.

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So, in 1891 Rowland St ran straight through from Perth St to Higher Antley St, parallel with Pendle St. I've had a closer look, in real life, at the gate/wall and the gate shows evidence of being built later than the wall to the right as the stones are a little different. It looks like the vicarage may have been the building which caused the houses to require renumbering if it was built later than 1900. I wonder now if that house was the original vicarage. Do we know when the church was built?

There's an oddity in the back street arrangements too just down there.

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According to the info on the Accrington Deanery web page it is 1889 and is Grade II listed.

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The vicarage (ie the building which isn't on your map) was built in 1899 according to a stone over the door, so that puts paid to my idea of it being the house which caused the renumbering of Willows Lane because the houses which had to be renumbered were built in 1900.

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It gets better, the area bounded by Willows Lane, Perth Street and what is now Bullough Park wasn't built in 1891 and is just shown as fields. Ormerod Street stops at Pendle Street. So the mystery of the confused numbering is not going to be easy to solve. I dimly recall something being said, a long long time ago, to the effect that buildings were knocked down at the top of Ormerod Street to make a connection with Willows Lane. This a very vague memory and I stand to be corrected on this.