A GOLDEN Jubilee, in normal times, is widely celebrated.

Many of us will remember the 2002 celebrations marking Queen Elizabeth II’s 50th year as monarch.

When Blackburn Rovers notched up 50 years in 1925, there was an excellent commemorative book which sold well.

Accrington Town Council produced a book in 1928, when they celebrated 50 years as a Corporation. The same year librarian Joseph Pomfret wrote a Jubilee Souvenir to mark the Darwen’s milestone.

There have been many similar celebrations throughout East Lancashire.

What won’t be celebrated this year though, is 50 years of the Whalley-Clitheroe by-pass; opened to traffic in January 1971. It has been called the “Death Road.”

A few years ago Ribble Valley MP Nigel Evans said the number of accidents on the road was “phenomenal.”

At nearly nine miles long, it was the biggest road project to be completed in the area since the arrival of the turnpike roads in the first half of the 19th century. It cost the taxpayer just short of £4 million – around £50 million today and, surprisingly, it was it was completed ahead of schedule.

The route planned was to by-pass the villages of Whalley and Chatburn and the bigger town of Clitheroe, starting off South of the Petre Arms at Langho and finishing close to Smithies Bridge at the Lancashire/Yorkshire Border at Chatburn.

It was a small piece in a bigger plan of the major trunk road from Liverpool to Hull – the A59.

Ripping through the Ribble Valley, the new by-pass dissected several farms, and a three-day enquiry was needed for landowners to contest the compulsory purchase ordered necessary for construction.

Despite the mass acquisition of land for the project, only a small row of cottages between Whalley and Barrow, and a semi-detached house not far from Calderstones Hospital, were the only houses to be pulled down.

Reports from the time suggest that the Clitheroe & District Rural Council decided to ‘take no action’ to rehome those who had lost their houses. Perhaps they got a decent payout.

Plans had been afoot for a road to by-pass Whalley and Clitheroe before the Second World War, and then again afterwards. Neither idea got very far.

In fact, the current road almost never happened after the Government of the time speculated whether to move the money towards a project linking the Calder Valley to the M6. It would be another 10 years until the M65 opened its first stretch.

An Easterly by-pass was opened in 1972 from a new roundabout close to Bramley Meade, past Spring Wood and to Portfield Bar – allowing day-trippers to Blackpool to avoid getting stuck in Whalley.

I’m sure many readers will have memories of being held up in Whalley before the A59 as we know it today was opened.

In the 50 years that East Lancashire has known the A59, there has been little regard for the road because of all the accidents that have happened along the fairly short stretch that runs through East Lancashire to the Yorkshire border.

There have been a lot of fatalities; a great many serious accidents. Lives have been changed for ever. It may have speeded up traffic through the valley, but not without cost.