The property is now known as Greenhill and is situated in its own grounds on a site in Manchester Road. The grounds, these days, are not laid out as gardens but most of the land is now a bowling green. In fact Greenhill is one of the three surviving private bowling greens – Ighten Mount and St Andrew's are the other two – in Burnley. However, Greenhill did not, as we shall see, start that way.

The present house, I suspect, is the fourth or fifth to occupy the site. It could be that even more houses have existed here but the difficulty is that, though it might now be within the borough, Greenhill is not historically in Burnley. For much of its history the property was in Habergham Eaves.

I have referred to this problem before. Habergham Eaves might have been much larger (in terms of area) than Burnley but most of it never rose above the status of a mere village or township. Habergham Eaves did not have its own church or chapel until modern times, its market was not chartered and it never had its own Grammar School until the former Burnley Grammar School occupied, in 1959, a site which had formerly been in Habergham.

One of the consequences of all this is that there are fewer historic records relating to Habergham than to Burnley. The earliest record we have of Greenhill can be traced to the year 1311 but, for it, it is clear there was a building on the site before that time. For 1311 we have a list of the freeholders of the Burnley area and one of them was described as "Adam, son of the clerk". The clerk, of course, was the parson of St Peter's and we know that, about this time, the clerk of Burnley was Johannes (John) of Burnley.

Adam held a property at Picop which is where the change of name comes in. Confusingly, the old name for Greenhill is Picop of Pickup. A Michael of Picop held the land before John of Burnley and we know the property was a farmstead of 21 acres. We also know Adam was married to Mabel and they had three daughters, Alice, Elana and Matilda. By two gifts of 1342 and 1344, all the property connected with what is now the Manchester Road site, along with some land near St Peter's, was granted to Whalley Abbey.

It is worth pausing here to say a few things about the name Pickup. It apparently derives from Pickup Bank, near Blackburn and persons called Pickup may be able to trace their ancestry to that place. However, the name Pickup means "pointed" or the high point (of a hill), a description which would apply, at least to some extent, to the Manchester Road site.

Another point worth recording is that the site of Burnley Bus Station was once known as Pickup Croft. The street name (Croft Street) still applies but there is an association with Pickup (Greenhill), in Manchester Road, in that the land at the Croft was farmed by Pickup.

Going back to the house, the next we hear is that the Abbey is renting out at least some of the land there to John Towneley, of Towneley. This was before the Tattersall family came into possession of the estate prior to 1443, thus starting a long association with Greenhill.

The Tattersalls were more than likely a Burnley family. They never reached the status of the Towneleys of Towneley but were included in the ranks of the lesser gentry by 1600. The family was not only dependent on income from farming. Several 17th Century members of the family were associated with the textile industry. James Tattersall (1617-1654) was a woollen manufacturer. However, toward the end of the 17th Century that Halstead's of Bankhouse acquired the property which, in 1729, came into the possession of the Halsteads of Rowley, who also owned part of the Hood House Estate which was nearby on what is now Manchester Road. Hood House is now the site of Scott Park.

One of the pieces of research I have wanted to undertake for some time is to look at the Tattersall and Halstead of Rowley families. There are still, today in Burnley, inhabited buildings associated with both families and Tattersalls and Halsteads have made their mark at national as well as local level.

If we look at the photo, we see a building which is clearly quite old. The rendering of the walls makes it difficult to be precise about the age of the building and, although mullioned, the windows are too large to be anything earlier than about 1690.

Mr Bennett, the historian of Burnley, tells us the house was rebuilt about 1600 when many of the larger houses of the district were given similar attention. What happened, at this time, was that timber buildings were replaced by ones constructed in stone and I suspect this was the case here. What we cannot be clear about is how many timber buildings occupied the site over the three centuries before 1600 when we know there was property on the site.

The last thing to mention is the recent history of the building. In the 19th Century the house was owned by the Artindale family. In 1872, for instance, we find it the property of Mr Thomas Artindale who was a partner in the Burnley firm of solicitors Handsley and Artindale whose main offices were at 4 Hargreaves Street. Many of you will recall these premises as Artindale's Buildings. They were on the site of the former Halifax Building Society offices which have recently been vacated.

It may have been at this time the name Greenhill was finally adopted. After its association with the Artingdale's the house became the property of Mr Luke Thornber who, in the 1920s, leased it to a bowling club, the game still played there.