IT WAS a stone-laying ceremony with a difference -- marking not just the building of something new, but the destruction of something unique...the oldest settlement in Rossendale.

It is doubtful whether, in these more conservation-conscious times, a council would be able to sweep away scores of ancient houses as easily as Rawtenstall did when the 450-year-old hilltop village of Newchurch was obliterated in the early 1960s.

But what is certain is that, before the demolition spree and the redevelopment that was commemorated by the stone laid 36 years ago next month by the Mayor, Alderman William Nuttall, old Newchurch was in a truly sorry state.

Originally, the village was a key stopping place on the old turnpike road from Rochdale to Whalley, having sprung up around and drawn its name from St Nicholas' Parish Church, built in 1511.

But though it became a thriving spot -- the place where Rossendale's slipper industry first began and where annual fairs were so busy that stalls stood all the way up Turnpike Hill and all the way through the village -- its prominence was first curtailed by the building of a new, more convenient main road through Rossendale along the valley's floor.

Yet , real signs of its decline did not become evident until after the Second World War when around half the houses in Old Street had to be knocked down and their site was left undeveloped.

What drove Newchurch even further downhill was hard to explain. "No-one seems to know what began the decline," this newspaper said in 1960.

But by then many of Newchurch's once-attractive cottages, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries were literally crumbling, many of them standing empty with decaying roofs, bellying walls and gaping holes for windows.

"Yet, 20 years or more ago, it was an old-world village of some renown, glorying in its links with the past," the Evening Telegraph added.

Among the deserted properties was the Old Parsonage on Church Street, built in 1720 to house the incumbents of St Nicholas' and once one of the finest buildings in Rossendale, distinguished by a distinctive sundial over the front door.

Another of the historic street's doomed buildings was that of the village hatter identified by the triangular pediment over its doorway, above which was a plaque with the inscription "J.E. Lord, 1781" and a lion rampant, a replica of which was said to have been embossed in the lining of the headwear he made.

But a year after Rawtenstall Council decided in July, 1960, after two years of deliberation to go ahead with its £128,000 scheme for the redevelopment of the village, which the then-Councillor Nuttall described as the "Mother of the Rossendale Valley," nearly all Newchurch's 150 houses , some with date stones more than a century older than the hatter's, were in a shocking state and more than 40 just gaunt, empty shells.

Another nail in the village's coffin was that Church Street -- part of the main road from Rawtenstall to Waterfoot -- was simply too narrow to cope with the increase in traffic of the 1960s. The council's plans to replace it with a new stretch of road would eliminate the dangerous 'S' bend that drivers had to negotiate.

By Christmas, 1962, 42 buildings had been pulled down in the area that took in Turnpike, Church Street and Back Street -- among them the last of the three fish and chip shops that the village once had-- while early 1963 saw another 30 disappear to make way for the 64 new houses that were planned as the new Newchurch.