Administrative Boundary of Lancashire

About Lancashire

Lancashire is a county in the North West of England. Covering approximately 2,903 square kilometres from the Pennine moorlands in the east to the Irish Sea coast in the west, Lancashire had a population of approximately 1.2 million at the 2021 Census (excluding the unitary authorities of Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool). The county encompasses the historic city of Lancaster, the upland beauty of the Forest of Bowland, the market towns and mill heritage of the Ribble Valley and East Lancashire, and two of the most significant events in English religious history — the founding vision of the Quaker movement on Pendle Hill, and the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. Lancaster: The County Town Lancaster, the county town and a city since 1937, sits on the River Lune at the foot of the Forest of Bowland. Lancaster Castle — a complex of buildings spanning nine centuries, built around a Norman motte on which a wooden castle may have stood since William I — has served successively as a medieval baronial fortress, a royal castle, a court of assize, and a prison; transportation ships for convicted convicts sailed from Lancaster to Australia from the 1780s to 1850s. The castle was also the courthouse for the most infamous witch trial in English history: the 1612 trials of the Pendle Witches, in which 20 people from the Pendle area of east Lancashire were charged with witchcraft, and 10 were hanged on the moor above Lancaster Castle. The Ashton Memorial (1909), a magnificent domed Baroque folly on the hill above Lancaster, is one of the most spectacular Edwardian buildings in England and is sometimes called "the Taj Mahal of the North." Pendle Hill and Religious History Pendle Hill — the distinctive, flat-topped moorland summit rising to 557 metres above the Ribble Valley — is associated with two of the most significant events in English religious history separated by forty years. In 1612, a cluster of families in the villages around Pendle's slopes were accused of witchcraft in the most extensive and best-documented witch trial in English history; ten people were executed. In 1652, George Fox climbed Pendle Hill and experienced a transformative vision — he "saw a great people to be gathered" — which led directly to his founding of the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers), one of the most influential dissenting Christian movements in British and American history. The Forest of Bowland The Forest of Bowland — designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty — covers approximately 803 square kilometres of upland moorland and riverside valley in northeastern Lancashire. Despite its name it is not primarily a forest but a broad tract of moorland and fell, with heather-covered tops and deep valleys carrying the rivers Hodder, Ribble, and Lune. Largely privately owned as shooting moorland, it is one of the most unspoiled and least visited upland landscapes in England. The Trough of Bowland pass through the heart of the AONB is one of the finest scenic drives in the county. Industrial and Textile Heritage East Lancashire — Burnley, Nelson, Colne, Accrington, Clitheroe, Chorley — was the heartland of the Lancashire cotton industry in the 18th and 19th centuries. The mill towns of east Lancashire contain some of the most significant industrial heritage in England: weaving sheds, spinning mills, mill workers' terraces, and the canals and railway infrastructure that connected them to the markets of the world. The Pendle Heritage Centre and the Queen Street Mill Textile Museum (Burnley) — the only remaining steam-powered weaving mill in the world — preserve this heritage. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Lancashire County Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the ONS Open Geography Portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports moorland conservation, witch trial heritage mapping, textile industry archaeology, religious history research, and demographic analysis across the Lancashire local authority area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Lancashire county