One witness said that around 1450 two men who had a smithy in Bentley Wood searched for iron at Broadhead and found coal and began mining it.

Local farmers alleged that half a century before Sir John Towneley had used forged documentation to create an enclosed area that had become known as Horelaw Pasture.

A Duchy Special Commission subsequently found this to have been an encroachment and confiscated the approximately 400-acre (160 ha) area, situated directly south of another enclosure called Hollin Hey.

However shortly after James I came to the English throne, the land was granted to the 1st Earl of Devonshire, and before 1612 another Richard Towneley, the great-grandson of Sir John, was able to reacquire it.

This made Sir John so unpopular with the local people a tradition arose that his ghost wanders the hills calling "Be warned!

[7][4] Crown Point Road was built as part of the first attempt by a Turnpike Trust to improve the journey between Burnley and Rochdale following an Act in 1754-55.

The Burnley and Edenfield Trust built the A682—formerly the A56—Manchester Road soon after 1795, crossing the other at the former Bull and Butcher Inn where a toll bar was situated.

In 1817 the Rochdale and Burnley Trust commenced work on what is now the A671 Bacup/Todmorden Road, which forms part of the modern parish boundary (along with a branch through Cliviger to Todmorden).

[9][4] In April 1941, during World War II a Starfish site bombing decoy was constructed off Crown Point Road, part of a network designed to protect Accrington.

[10] On 6 May 1941, a string of eight bombs straddled houses around Rossendale Avenue on the southern edge of Burnley, causing only minor damage.

After the English Civil War his descendants sold the estate in parts, George Halsted becoming the owner of the hall in 1689 as the result of the foreclosure of a mortgage.

A boundary change which took effect at the start of 1983, transferred a small part of parish lying west of Limey Lane into Dunnockshaw.