LOOKING Back's glance a couple of weeks ago at the long-disappeared Dolphin Hotel that was tucked away in a concealed corner of Blackburn brought memories flooding back for 90-year-old Mrs Marion Procter, who used to live alongside the pub in Mount Street.

That was her home for 17 years until she married in 1934 and she still recalls many of the folk and businesses in the now-vanished island of streets off almost-gone High Street. Among them is Pilkington's stained glass works next door to the pub and Burns' sweet shop at the top of the street and, in particular, Rayton's smithy at the corner of nearby Well Street and High Street.

The picture shown here of Rayton's premises dates possibly from the late 1940s but may be of the old-established blacksmith's forge when it moved to Forrest Street some time after 1942. Can any reader pinpoint its location? One feature of the locality that Mrs Procter recalls especially is the pungent Fish Hillock, or Fish Dock, just off Mount Street where trains coming from the coast unloaded their cargo of seafood.

"Every market day, the town's fish sellers had their carts lined up early in the morning on the Fish Dock and often people passing on their way to work would pinch a fish or two," she recalls. Another of the vicinity's illicit activities that she remembers from her childhood was the "pitch and toss" gambling school -- based on heads-or-tails guesses of coins tossed the air -- that was held in the Calendar Street "back".

"The police would go and raid it and all the chaps involved would run for it while us children would go looking to see if there was any money left on the floor," Mrs Procter laughs.