Austerlands is located on the A62 Huddersfield Road; roughly three miles from the Oldham town centre at almost 1,000 feet above sea level. Because of this it commands outstanding views over the Mossley valley; the Derbyshire hills; and over the city of Manchester, with the Cheshire plain and the Welsh mountains beyond. It is often described as the gateway to Saddleworth.

The original settlements grew up at the junction of old packhorse routes running along what are now Thorpe Lane, Old Lane and Heywood Lane. Further development took place following the construction of the Wakefield - Austerlands turnpikes and with the building of the Austerlands cotton mill during the course of the Industrial Revolution. The mill’s stone chimney is a well-know landmark, which has lasted for over 200 hundred years.

The houses of the village mark the transition between the brick buildings of Lancashire and the stone buildings of Yorkshire. It has a history, which can be traced back to the Ancient Austerlands of the1400s.
There is a house, at the Lees end of Birks Brow, which carries the name Alstonlondes. This is what the hamlet was called in 1422, when Austerlands was part of the manor owned by Sir John Assheton. According to the historian Hartley Bateson, Alston is a shortened form of the Anglo-Saxon name AElstan and that this suggests that the original settler was an Anglian farmer.
Sometime before 1547, the Lees family of Lees acquired a farmstead built in a ‘slack’, or a swampy close, and this eventually became known as Slack Hall. In 1660, James Lees and his son Edmund, a blacksmith, rebuilt Slack Hall Farm and preserved the initials of himself and his wife Jane, plus those of Edmund and his wife Mary, on the lintel of the doorway. When, in the 1980s, Slack Hall gave way to the new housing that still carries its name, the date and initials conserved by James Lees were duplicated over the door of one of houses.

1660
JL JL EL ML

The Wakefield - Austerlands Road was the first of the turnpikes to run through Saddleworth. The Act for building the road was passed in 1758 and its route went up Thorpe Lane to Doctor Lane Head, before skirting Highmoor on its way to Delph. Around 1760 a house was built - at what is now 39, Thorpe Lane - to collect the tolls from users of the turnpike. By 1822, this section of the turnpike had fallen into disuse and the ‘old bar house’ was purchased, from the trustees by Edward Lees, for the sum of £70. It is now a Grade II listed building.
The turnpike road, by this time, had been re-routed through the yard of Austerlands Mill, stranding the chimney from its mill on the opposite side of what is now Huddersfield Road. The chimney itself was built of hand worked stone by, it is said, a local stoneyard proprietor

Go to part two