The original building appears to have been a catholic mass house, built in 1666. This was forfeit and turned into a workhouse in 1734. By the early 1800s it had been substantially expanded into a ‘large roughcast edifice’ and had a county wide reputation as a ‘receptacle of poverty’ with over 200 inmates. It was used as a poorhouse and lunatic asylum.
The workhouse caused some scandal with its poor conditions and the fact that it continued to take paupers from over 80 townships in England. A number of attempts were made to have it closed due to the poor treatment of the inmates. By the middle of the 1800s it was becoming the main workhouse for Chorley. The building of the new workhouse at Eaves Lane in Chorley resulted in the closure of the Brindle Workhouse in 1871.
“… July 7, 1718 Thomas Coupe deposed that the house in which he lived was occupied by one Holland, a priest, for a Mass house and that the ground on which it stood belonged to Mr. Gerard. The Gerards dare not claim the property…”
“… the governor of the house is behaving in a very harsh and improper manner to the inmates they are kept in a very filthy state and also have not proper food.
… The children are all going off in consequence of the impure food and filthy state in which they are kept.
… The house is much too small for the number of paupers who are sent there, there now being upwards of eighty townships sending poor there.”
“… Alexander Fowler an inmate of unsound mind there had been restrained during part of the week by leg locks there being no other means of preventing his escape over the walls …”
“ … John Heywood, George Blackstone and Jervis Hewson were charged by the Governor with absenting themselves without leave and disposing of clothes the property of the Union. And the Governor was directed to confine them for 24 hours and to substitute the diet prescribed by Article 129 of the Consolidated Order for their usual rations.”
The Workhouse Building
The first mass house was probably a small domestic size building, possibly on part of the site now occupied by the ‘pen’, close to the road. There is a cross site on the corner of the track and road. The main workhouse building appears to have been built, expanded and rebuilt a number of times. At its peak, it seems to have taken in the whole of the raised ‘pen’ and the ‘paddock’ area behind Top o’ th’ Lane. Indications are that, although large, the building was probably quite roughly built and at least for part of its existence was largely whitewashed.
The ‘footprint’ of the workhouse is a large, leveled area, raised at the front and terraced into the hill at the rear. Although it is difficult to know whether any of the existing building were parts of the workhouse, there are a significant number of rebuilt walls and some older, more tumbledown, ones on the site.