Under this new and more liberal impression greater facilities were offered both to purchasers of land and builders, so that the early error into which they had fallen was rectified before any great amount of harm had been done. During the summer of 1808 the Preston volunteers were on duty at Blackpool for two weeks, and on the 4th of June celebrated the seventieth birthday of His Majesty George III. with many demonstrations of loyalty and rejoicing. The small town now boasted five good class hotels, which, in their order from north to south, were named Dickson’s, Forshaw’s, Bank’s, Simpson’s, and the Yorkshire House. Simpson’s, formerly Hull’s, is now the Royal Hotel; Bank’s the Land Ends Hotel, and Dickson’s was the one already mentioned as Bailey’s Hotel. “Adjoining Forshaw’s Hotel,” writes a gentleman who visited Blackpool about that date; “there are two or three houses of genteel appearance, compared with the many small cottages leading thence to the street, which is the principal entrance from Preston. There is a promenade with an arbour at the end of it, and beyond it nearer to Dixon’s Hotel stands a cottage used as a warm bath. Beyond Dixon’s there is a public road where two four-wheeled vehicles can pass each other.” At a later period both the road and cottage alluded to had succumbed to the unchecked power of the advancing sea; and here it will be convenient to mention other and much more serious encroachments made by the same element in the course of years now long gone by. We can scarcely conceive, when gazing on the indolent deep in its placid mood, that at any time it could have been possessed with such a demon of fury and destruction as to swallow up broad fields, acres upon acres, of the foreland of the Fylde, and in its blind anger sweep away whole villages, levelling the house walls and uprooting the very foundations, so that no trace or vestige of their former existence should remain. History, however, points to a hamlet called Waddum Thorp, which once stood off the coast of Lytham, fenced from the sea by a broad area of green pasture-land, now known as the Horse-bank; and in more recent years a long range of star-hills ran southward from opposite the Royal Hotel, protecting a highway, fields, and four or five cottages from the waves, whilst a little further north a boat-house afterwards a shoemaker’s shop, stood in the centre of a grassy plot, all of which have vanished, and their sites are now covered and obliterated by the sand and pebbles of the beach. The several roads, which had been formed at different seasons, leading over the cliffs to Bispham, were sapped away and destroyed so rapidly by the incursions of the tide that one more inland and circuitous was obliged to be made. On the sands, about three miles to the north of Blackpool, and so far distant from the shore that it is only visible when the water has receded to its lowest ebb, stands the famous Penny-stone.