About
The Pendle Heritage Centre in Barrowford, near Nelson in Lancashire, is the principal heritage attraction for the Pendle area — a district whose name is known worldwide, thanks to one of the most notorious episodes in English legal history: the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612.
In the summer of 1612, twelve men and women from the villages and farms around Pendle Hill were tried at Lancaster Assizes on charges of witchcraft and murder by supernatural means. Ten of them were found guilty and hanged at Lancaster Castle on 20 August 1612, in one of the largest mass executions for witchcraft in English history. The accused came from two rival families — the Devices and the Nutters — living in poverty on the slopes of Pendle Hill, and their story has fascinated historians, writers, and visitors for four centuries. The Heritage Centre tells this story with sensitivity and scholarly rigour, placing it in the context of Jacobean religion, law, poverty, and social tension.
But the Pendle Heritage Centre is far more than a witch museum. It is housed in Park Hill, a handsome complex of historic buildings centred on a seventeenth-century farmhouse that is itself a monument to the area's past. Displays range from prehistoric times — Pendle's landscape was settled thousands of years before the Romans arrived — through the medieval period, when Pendle Forest was a royal hunting ground managed by the Duchy of Lancaster, to the Industrial Revolution that transformed the valleys below Pendle Hill into a landscape of cotton mills and weaving sheds.
The textile industry was the backbone of Pendle's economy for two centuries. Nelson, Colne, and Barrowford were mill towns, and the Heritage Centre documents this industrial heritage alongside the agricultural traditions of the upland farming communities that preceded and surrounded it.
The centre is also the gateway to the Pendle area's outstanding walking country. Pendle Hill itself — the brooding moorland mass that dominates the landscape — is one of Lancashire's most celebrated viewpoints, and the Pendle Way long-distance footpath starts near the Heritage Centre.
Categories:
Highlights
The Pendle Witch Trials of 1612
The Heritage Centre's most celebrated exhibits explore the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612 — the largest mass witchcraft trial in English history. In August 1612, ten men and women from the Pendle area were hanged at Lancaster Castle after being convicted of murder by witchcraft. The accused came primarily from two rival local families, the Devices and the Nutters, living in poverty on the slopes of Pendle Hill.
The Heritage Centre tells their story with historical rigour and human compassion, examining the social, religious, and political forces that turned neighbours against each other in Jacobean England with such devastating consequences.
Park Hill: A Seventeenth-Century Farmhouse
The Heritage Centre itself is housed in Park Hill, a complex of historic buildings centred on a handsome seventeenth-century farmhouse that is one of the finest surviving examples of vernacular Lancashire domestic architecture. Built in the Pennine tradition with thick stone walls, mullioned windows, and a sturdy slate roof, the farmhouse and its associated buildings have been carefully conserved and adapted for heritage use.
The buildings give a vivid physical sense of the world in which the Pendle witch trial participants lived, worked, and struggled — the same stone walls and domestic spaces that would have been familiar to the Devices and Nutters.
Prehistory and Medieval Pendle
Long before the witch trials, the Pendle landscape was home to communities stretching back thousands of years. The Heritage Centre explores prehistoric settlement in the area through archaeological evidence, tracing the human use of this upland landscape from the Mesolithic through the Bronze Age and Iron Age.
The medieval period is documented through the history of Pendle Forest — not a woodland but a royal hunting forest managed by the Duchy of Lancaster — and the farming communities that existed within and around it, subject to the complex obligations and constraints of medieval land law.
The Lancashire Textile Industry
The valleys below Pendle Hill were transformed by the Industrial Revolution into one of Lancashire's most intensive cotton-weaving landscapes. Nelson, Colne, and Barrowford grew rapidly as mill towns in the nineteenth century, and the Heritage Centre documents this industrial transformation through photographs, artefacts, and oral history.
The transition from handloom weaving — a domestic cottage industry practised in the farmhouses and cottages of the hillsides — to factory production in the valley mills is a story of dramatic social and economic change that shaped the communities of Pendle for generations.
Collections
The Pendle Witches: A Story of 1612
The Heritage Centre's core gallery telling the full story of the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials — the social context, the individuals accused, the legal proceedings, the executions at Lancaster, and the lasting cultural legacy. Interpretation is scholarly, sympathetic, and avoids sensationalism.
Pendle Through the Ages
A survey of the Pendle area's history from prehistoric settlement through the medieval period, the development of the textile industry, and the social history of the communities that grew up around Pendle Hill. Covers farming, industry, notable people, and the evolution of the landscape.
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.