Pendle Heritage Centre

This is Pendle Heritage Centre, housed in a historic manor house in Barrowford, Nelson, Lancashire. There you can discover not only the history of the area, but find out all about the Pendle Witches. In 1612 at the assizes at Lancaster, twenty persons of the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire, sixteen of them women, were tried for witchcraft. Ten were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, condemned on the strength of some very dubious 'evidence'. The accusations, the story of the so-called witches and the subsequent trial have formed the basis of countless books and TV drama documentaries. Today dark thoughts of witches and witchcraft were very far from everyone's minds as they enjoyed the sunshine, the beautiful Barrowford Park gardens and lake, and wandered round the Heritage Centre.