To find the nearest racecourses now, you’d have to head to Cartmel, or even Aintree but for 125 years, Lancaster had its own, very popular racecourses…

The first course was situated on Lancaster Marsh and the very first race was held in 1732 with a 50 guinea prize. The winning horse named ‘Whittington’ was owned by Mr Rawlinson (Lancaster’s principal merchant in the West Indies trade; trading in slaves and exotic woods). The course was extremely popular but due to the enclosure of Lancaster Marsh and the rising crowds a new location had to be found and in 1809, a brand new course was opened on Lancaster Moor. This course sat behind where the Moor Hospital Annexe (now known as The Residence) can be found and goes across the M6 motorway.

For many years, the newspapers of the time talked about the popularity, quality of the horses and riders and the large number of meetings and prizes taking place at the course that drew crowds from across the north west. However by the 1840s, horse racing was becoming less popular and the crowds were thinning so as a way of enticing people back a grandstand was built on an embankment (behind the Moor Hospital Annexe) in 1848. Sadly, this still didn’t draw the crowds in the long-term and the racecourse closed after the final race meeting in July 1857.

The Lancaster Guardian on the 11th July reported that very few horses raced, the attendees were mainly from town rather than pulling in crowds from around Lancashire and that those that did attend were ‘roughs’… who were not to be courted’ and ‘every kind of gambling dodge was in full swing’. In typical Victorian fashion, the racecourse, full of ‘immoralities’ no longer had any place in Lancaster.

The site of the old Marsh Racecourse was later built upon by Lune Mills and extends under what today is the Lune Industrial Estate, modern housing developments and Freeman’s Pools nature reserve. Development of the County Lunatic Asylum (Moor Hospital) Annexe and later the M6 motorway cut through the old racecourse on the Moor but did you know that LiDAR scanning still reveals much of the course? See if you can spot it…