An attempt is made today to redress this situation, but I should add that my main problem is the lack of suitable images on which I can base an article.

One would have thought that highways as important as Todmorden Road and Lyndhurst Road would have been subjected to the skills of postcard makers in the past, as have streets of similar status across the borough, but so far as I know, this is not the case. I have even checked at Burnley Library to see what images of Fulledge might have been preserved but there are very few.

Perhaps some more will come to light in the future but in the meantime can I introduce you to a postcard in the Briercliffe Society's collection? It contains two images of Fulledge House and I have chosen to publish one which many of you will not have seen before. There is no message and no stamp on the card so determining a date is not all that straightforward but there are some clues.

First, we ought to ascertain where Fulledge House was. As there is a building of that name in Todmorden Road you might think the building in the picture was on the exact site. However, if you thought that you would be wrong. The original Fulledge House was on the plot of land which, until recently, contained the much-lamented Todmorden Road schools.

If you look at the photo you will notice a number of workmen are on site. In the foreground, you will be able to see a wooden pathway has been constructed, possibly to give easy access to men pushing wheelbarrows. Are these men part of the team whose job it was to demolish Fulledge House and prepare the site for the building of Todmorden Road schools? The latter were opened in 1908.

I hope you can see, in the background, left, that there is a large building with an equally sizeable roof. This is St Catherine's Church which was consecrated on May 4th, 1987. I don't need to draw your attention to the conclusion that today's photograph was taken between 1987 and 1908.

Fulledge first enters our local history in the early 14th Century when it was one of the farms or small hamlets which, together with the area around St Peter's, made up the Township of Burnley. The name, I am afraid, means "dirty pool" and is given as Fullach in 1510. Mr Bennett translates the name as "foul or dirty letch", the latter being boggy land.

A study of early maps indicates that, before it was built up, there were a number of small streams in this part of town. One of them defined the south western boundary of the house, its cottages, barns and gardens. This stream, and others, flowed in the direction of the Calder which is only the length of a row of houses away from the original site of Fulledge House.

The land attached to Fulledge House was largely pastoral rather than arable although it is known the property had its own orchards. These are shown on Fishwick's map of 1827 and on the 1844 Merryweather map the same plot of land is described as a "kitchen garden".

Fulledge House is one of those buildings about which relatively little is known. It is thought the stone building you see in the picture dates from 1576. Earlier structures would have been constructed largely out of timber.

If you look at the photo you will see there is quite a complex of buildings on site. The 1827 map shows what I take to be the original house fronted by its gardens and orchards with substantial buildings behind. These latter structures can be seen on the left of the picture. They appear to be houses at the time the photog was taken but they do not seem to have the age of the earlier building which, as you can see, looks south west.

There are several features of interest on the older house. Notice that the windows are not uniform – on the left of the building, rounded mullions, horizontal ones to the right. On the extreme right the single-storey building looks that it may, originally, have had agricultural use. The brick chimney is much later. On the left of the building, notice what appears to be decoration to the left of, considering the age of the building, the surprisingly small chimney. I wonder if the owner of Fulledge House decided to decorate this elevation when the Towneleys made improvements to the entrance to their park or when they constructed Handbridge Castle, not many yards down the road?

The decorations, castellations, I think, on Fulledge House are sited on the part of the house nearest the highway and on the top of what might formerly have been a large domestic chimney. Houses of this era often had chimneys of similar proportions but they dated properties and later owners often masked them in some way. This is what might have happened here and, although you cannot see it in today's picture, the Todmorden Road boundary was marked by a quite impressive wall which had two gates in it, one for coaches, the other for pedestrians.

A few words about some of the families that lived at Fulledge. The builders of the house were the Inghams who lived at Fulledge from the later 15th Century until it was sold to Mr Henry Blackmore in 1721. When the purchase was made, the estate, by then quite extensive, was still farmed but it was to become very valuable when coal was found. Mr Blackmore exploited this and founded Burnley's largest commercial enterprise, the Hargreaves' Collieries.