Between Chapeltown and Egerton are the remains of prehistoric stone circles on moorland at Cheetham Close which date back to the Bronze Age.

[3][4] In the 19th century there were many uninvited visitors to the site which caused the local farmer, a tenant of Turton Tower, to break it up in 1871 using his team of carthorses and sledge hammers.

Before this happened, antiquarian, Gilbert French, had made sketches, maps and plans and written a detailed description which is now in Bolton Reference Library.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the timbered farmhouse buildings on the east and north of the Tower and the Entrance Hall were added.

The Tower passed to his descendants, the Bland, Green and Frere families who leased it to a succession of tenant farmers.

[1] The tower was sold in 1835 to James Kay (1774–1857), who had harnessed steam power and developed the first commercially successful wet-spinning process for flax in 1825.

In October 1903 the tower was bought by Sir Lees Knowles, 1st Baronet MP for Salford West for £3,875.

After local government re-organisation in 1974, Turton was split and the tower became part of the new borough of Blackburn, and was administered by Lancashire County Museums Service.

[5] The Summerhouse east of Turton Tower, a grade II* listed building, is on the heritage at risk register.

[8] Until the 19th century Turton was a township and chapelry in the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Bolton le Moors in the Salford hundred of Lancashire.

The Turton township covered an area of 4,614 acres (18.67 km2) and extended in a north and north-west direction for nearly 5 miles (8 km).

[1] Turton had two Anglican chapels of ease in the ancient ecclesiastical parish of Bolton le Moors, in the hundred of Salford, Lancashire.

Its old ground at Chapeltown, which is still used by the Old Boltonians team, is believed to be the oldest football pitch in the world in use today.