There's a public footpath that takes you from one end of Orrell, near Wigan, to the other. It has always been known to locals as The Flaggy Fields – no one really knows why. There are no flags, no flag irises and no notable flag stones. The only explanation we have heard is from an octogenarian friend who remembers being told as a very small child in the 1920s of a railway line that, 100 years before, hauled coal from the Bankes family's Winstanley estate pits to the canal at Crooke. This much is true: it is mentioned in Donald Anderson's 1975 book The Orrell Coalfield, Lancashire 1740 – 1850. The trucks were hauled by one of the very earliest steam locomotives – "The Yorkshire Horse" - years before George Stephenson's much more famous "Rocket". The line would have crossed part of the Flaggy Fields footpath that in the 1930s was obliterated by houses on the Redwood estate. Our friend was told that where the trains crossed the main road (at the present junction of Bradshaw Street and the A577 Orrell Road) a man with a flag stopped the horse-drawn traffic to ensure safe passage. This may be an explanation of the Flaggy Fields name, but we will probably never know for sure.
The series of caches takes you from close to Orrell Water Park and Orrell station to Redwood Park in the Lamberhead Green end of the district. The path is easy walking and both well-used and wide enough to give safe passage past any nettles and brambles, though some may guard the caches' hiding places. There is ample, free off-road parking at the Water Park and on-street parking at Milton Grove at the other end. There are at least six more caches in and close to Redwood Park, and along Brook Lane and Hall Lane, which would make a 3-mile circular walk back to the Water Park.
Flaggy Fields 1 – Fields No More. Here you could at one time enter the playing fields of Orrell RU. It was a small club that won a good reputation in the days when rugby union clubs were amateur, but the openly professional era for the game that began in 1995 was unkind to what is, with all due respect, a minority sport in this area. As debts mounted and the first team dropped down the divisions, financial considerations saw the club sell the ground to Wigan Warriors, the town's world-famous Rugby League club, and revert to the purely amateur lower leagues. The small stadium and facilities have since seen massive investment by the Wigan RL club: this is now the Warriors' High Performance Training Centre for its players, while its reserve and junior sides play their matches here too. The Warriors have an unrivalled record of success in their sport from their beginnings in 1872 to the present day, when they are the best-supported club in the RL Super League and regularly win trophies. Three former lower-team and training pitches from the Orrell RU era were sold off as surplus to requirements – as you can now see. Only the concrete wall and a couple of blocked-off gateways remain.