England's Salad Bowl

Tarleton has become a popular place to live but its farming tradition has been bringing in outsiders for centuries.

- Martin Pilkington

IN times past, you could reach Tarleton by ship via the formerly navigable River Douglas, or by rail on the line that once linked Preston and Southport. These days, the village largely relies on the nearby A59 and A565 to connect it to the outside world, though a branch of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal still offers a more leisurely approach to this self-contained, productive and expanding community.

‘It’s a good question if Tarleton is a village or town now,’ says Anne Sutton, its greengrocer and a parish councillor. ‘Officially, it’s a village. It has all the amenities – schools, plenty of shops, churches, pubs – you don’t need to leave the village for anything much.’ The 2011 census showed a population of 5,652, but Anne believes new estates have lifted numbers nearer to 7,000.

One resident with deep roots is Stuart Johnson, whose family has run the village butcher’s for 90 years. ‘A lot of people commute elsewhere to work, but you’ll see them in the village at the weekend. People use the village. There are more and more houses being built, but really it’s still a village community. When things happen everybody gets together.’ A case in point was when the library was threatened and a huge petition helped keep it open.

Quite a few of the newer arrivals are of eastern European origin, attracted by what could be described as the growing demand for labour in the district. ‘This is now the salad bowl of England,’ says county councillor Malcolm Barron, whose family has lived in the area for 300 years or more. ‘In my grandparents’ time farms were more mixed. Their farm had a bit of everything – hens, corn, celery, salad, horses, cattle, pigs. Now Tarleton’s very focused on arable farming.’