About this website
The Walton le Dale Community Website is back online
Welcome back to the Walton le Dale area web site. This site was developed, originally in 2000, as a guide to facilities in the Walton le Dale area. It was offline for about six months, but has returned in July 2025. There are details on this site, or links to other sites, which provide access to useful public information relative to the area. There are also articles and pages that discuss the history and geography of Walton le Dale.
Since contributing to a number local Facebook Groups over the last few years, generally with articles and photographs relating to local history, I thought it would be worthwhile resurrecting the site. I can now include a lot of the social media content on the website.
The initial purpose of the site, about a quarter of a century ago, was to provide a platform locally to promote my web design business. It also served as a platform to try different technologies and promote other local business in the process. Google hadn’t yet begun to dominate the online search market, so many searches would pass through the site.
The 2025 version of the site will be very much aimed at promoting local heritage and local history.
On earlier incarnations of the site, which can all be found on the Internet Archive ‘Wayback Machine’ website, much of the historical content was ‘borrowed’ from other sources and slightly adapted. The new content is now very much ‘stuff’ that I have written myself.
Previous Versions of the Website
Previous versions of the Walton le Dale Community Website can be found on the Internet Archive ‘Wayback Machine’ website.
2016 – 2024 Version
https://web.archive.org/web/20240319195253/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
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2013 – 2015 Version
https://web.archive.org/web/20130620153448/http://www.waltonledale.co.uk
https://web.archive.org/web/20150812072533/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
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2011 – 2012 Version
https://web.archive.org/web/20111008004531/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120221163743/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
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2005 – 2009 Version
https://web.archive.org/web/20050208014943/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
https://web.archive.org/web/20070205104833/https://www.waltonledale.co.uk/
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2000 – 2004 Version
https://web.archive.org/web/20020314172037/http://www.waltonledale.co.uk/home.cfm
https://web.archive.org/web/20040407134305/http://www.waltonledale.co.uk/home.cfm
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About this Website’s Creator
At the turn of the millennium, when the web was still young and full of possibility, Ashley Preston (also seen online as Ash Preston or AshWarP), began a small online experiment. Working as a technical sales consultant in the emerging world of ecommerce, he believed the best way to understand new technologies was to get hands‑on with them. So he registered a domain, built a simple site, and filled it with whatever material was available. The subject matter — Walton‑le‑Dale, the village where he lived — was almost incidental. The site was, first and foremost, a technology project, a sandbox for learning web design, layout, and content management. Much of the early content was borrowed, adapted, or repurposed, as was common in the early internet era.
As the 2000s progressed, the site evolved into a platform for experimenting with affiliate programmes, SEO techniques, and the mechanics of online monetisation. It was never intended to be a historical authority or a community resource. It was simply a place to test ideas — a digital workshop for someone whose professional life revolved around helping others understand the commercial potential of the web.
Everything changed two decades later.
When the Covid‑19 pandemic arrived, the world shrank. Travel stopped, routines collapsed, and people turned their attention back to the places immediately around them. For Ashley, this shift rekindled a long‑standing but previously secondary interest in local history. He began engaging with community Facebook groups, sharing snippets of research and rediscovering the layers of heritage embedded in South Ribble and Preston.
The turning point came with an article by Steve Harrison of the Friends of Winckley Square and the Preston Historical Society. In it, Harrison recounted a moment during a history walk in Walton le Dale when a passing motorist laughed at the idea that the area had any history at all. The dismissiveness struck a nerve. It crystallised something Ashley had been sensing: that the rich, complex story of Walton‑le‑Dale was largely invisible to the people who lived there.
That moment became a catalyst.
What had begun as a technical experiment slowly transformed into a mission — to document, preserve, and share the history of Walton‑le‑Dale in a way that was accessible, engaging, and rooted in genuine local knowledge. The site grew, matured, and developed a distinctive voice. It became a place where scattered fragments of local memory could be gathered and made coherent.
Then, at the end of 2024, disaster struck. After years of reliable service, Ashley’s long‑standing hosting provider was absorbed by 123‑Reg (GoDaddy), triggering a cascade of technical failures that ultimately caused the entire site to disappear. Two decades of accumulated work vanished almost overnight.
But the loss didn’t end the story. It clarified it.
In the summer of 2025, Ashley rebuilt the site from the ground up — not as a technical exercise, not as a commercial experiment, but as a dedicated local‑history resource. The resurrection marked a new phase: intentional, research‑driven, and focused on making the history of Walton‑le‑Dale visible to anyone willing to look.
Today, the Walton‑le‑Dale Community Website stands as the product of a long, unexpected journey: from a coder’s playground to a meaningful contribution to local heritage. It reflects both the evolution of the web and the evolution of its creator — someone who began by experimenting with technology and ended by helping a community rediscover its past.
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Contact the author of this website
To contact the author of this website, please email:
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