- published: 23 Mar 2010
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Coordinates: 53°39′11″N 2°37′55″W / 53.653°N 2.632°W / 53.653; -2.632
Chorley is a market town in Lancashire, in North West England. It is the largest settlement in the Borough of Chorley. Chorley is located 8.1 miles North of Wigan and 19.5 miles north west of Manchester. As with the Lancashire and Greater Manchester region, the town's wealth came principally from the cotton industry. As recently as the 1970s the skyline was dominated by numerous factory chimneys, but most are now demolished: remnants of the industrial past include Morrison's chimney and a few other mill buildings, and the streets of terraced houses for mill workers. Chorley is known as the home of the Chorley cake.
The name Chorley came from Anglo-Saxon Ceorla-lēah = "the peasants' clearing".
The area around Chorley has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age. The earliest find came from 3500 BC on Anglezarke Moor at Round Loaf. A farmer at Astley Hall Farm found a pottery burial urn from this period in 1963. This find was followed up with further excavations, with further artifacts being found. Objects from these excavations are on display at the hall's museum.[citation needed]
Richard John Chorley (4 September 1927 - 12 May 2002) was a leading figure in the late 20th century for his work in quantitative geography, and played an instrumental role in bringing in the use of systems theory to geography.
Chorley grew up in south-west England in an area known as the West Country, with roots in Exmoor and the Vale of Taunton Deane. He was a product of a local primary school and Minehead Grammar School. Later on, Chorley began studying Geomorphology as an undergraduate at the School of Geography at Oxford, where he went up to Exeter College after service with the Royal Engineers. Here he was greatly influenced by R.P. Beckinsale, who advised Chorley to go on to graduate study in the United States. He made a transatlantic move in 1951 as a Fulbright Scholar to Columbia University where he was a graduate student in the Geology Department and explored the quantitative approach to land form evolution.
In 1957, Chorley's academic career at Columbia, and subsequently Brown University, was interrupted by the need to return to Britain for family reasons. He was soon appointed a Demonstrator at Cambridge University and proceeded to move rapidly up the university hierarchy with a readership in 1970 and ad hominem chair in 1974. Cambridge provided the launching pad for Chorley's revolutionary ideas. He rejected the prevailing paradigm of the Davisian cycles of erosion and sought to replace these with a quantitative model-based paradigm with an emphasis on General Systems Theory and numerical modelling.