Courtesy of Michael Mullaney via haslindens.blogspo.co.uk
"Oakenhead Wood Old Road I would hazard a guess that it originated as part of the old and ancient trackway which were developed about the 17th century along which travellers and merchants with their pack horses would travel.
It was much easier to skirt along the terraces of the hillsides and only descend when you came to the place you wished to visit. As wheeled traffic emerged and then got larger with heavier loads the trackways moved down the hillsides onto wider and firmer
routes as indeed did the development of the town. Oakenhead Wood Old Road is a part of the system which circled around Cribden. If we accept that all old and ancient routes started and finished at the parish church, its easy to visualise how they went to and from Blackburn, Bury, Newchurch, Burnley etc. In this case, up Higher Lane, turn right along Slate on Cribden End Lane, at the cross roads now where the Halo is you had options, left onto Laund Lane towards Duckworth Clough and onto Huncoat, or straight on Cribden End Lane, which skirted Cribden and came down on Burnley Road Rawtenstall, or turn right again on Laund Road, fork left at Spout House, and the road now has a connection with Haslingden Old Road at Height End where it changes its name to Oakenhead Wood Old Road.
This continues originally onto Rawtenstall, past Jolly Hall and the Ski Slope and the cottages at Oakenhead emerging at what is now Holland Avenue, and would eventually have terminated at the church in Oakenwood, (St. Mary's Rawtenstall).
Alternatively, you would have been able to branch off and continue to Newchurch. Its possible that these trackways were the predecessor of the Kings Highway.
Properties sprang up along these trackways at random intervals and its assumed they were mainly involved with sheep and wool, as to just why the small hamlet of Oakenhead Wood came to be I know not, they may have originally been in the wool trade but its not so far to walk down the hillside to the new mills at Swany in Rawtenstall. In passing, people walked from Accrington to Crawshawbooth to attend Goodshaw Chapel. To us this seems a long way to travel however, by going across the hills by these pathways its a relatively short hike, albeit a bit up and down!"