Scotsman's Stump

George Henderson, a young travelling cloth salesman from Annan, Dumfriesshire, was shot on Winter Hill while walking the old pack route between Blackrod and Blackburn via Belmont. A local collier, James Whittle, was tried for the killing but acquitted at a second trial, and the murder was never solved. The original marker was replaced by the current iron post - known locally as Scotsman's Stump - in 1912. LINK CHECK: the Cottontown page cited here has since gone offline (404) - the full text survives via the Wayback Machine (see references) and is actually a complete local-history monograph, 'Murder in the Heather: The Winter Hill Murder of 1838' by David Holding (1991, 2nd ed. 2017), drawing on Lancashire County Record Office and the Bolton, Blackburn and Preston local-studies collections; it corroborates the inscription and the outline above and has considerably more detail on the two trials of James Whittle than is captured here.