[a] Near Brown Hills Beck on the eastern border of the parish is a bowl barrow thought to date from the late Neolithic or Bronze Age periods.

Ownership passed to the Bannister family in the early sixteenth century, with the manor eventually being broken up and sold off piecemeal in the 1690s.

It is thought that the lands of Upper Easington may originally have been part of the Slaidburn township but grants by the de Lacys to Kirkstall Abbey in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave the area its own distinctive identity.

In 1220 or thereabouts, John de Lacy, 5th Lord of Bowland, granted an area west of the Hodder and north of Rushton known as "Gamellesarges".

The Coucher Book of Kirkstall Abbey suggests the lands of the upper Hodder north of Slaidburn were not known as Easington in the thirteenth century, merely as "Bouland".[8]: pp.

202–4  We might speculate that the manor of Lower Easington gained some influence over the area after the Reformation, with the civil administrative map being redrawn to reflect this change, perhaps during the seventeenth century.

[14] In 2009, a rare limeburners' clamp kiln was excavated at Halsteads in Upper Easington which carbon dating suggests was last fired somewhere between 1205 and 1280.

[9] There is evidence of prehistoric settlement in Lower Easington: with Skelshaw Ring, a Bronze Age monument, lying due south of Slaidburn.

Forming part of the catchment area for the Stocks Reservoir, today the land is largely owned by United Utilities, but since 1949 it has been leased by the Forestry Commission for timber production.