Eccles, Greater Manchester along the route of the track linking those two cities. Eccles cakes, first produced and sold in the town in 1796, are now exported across the world. The derivation of the name is uncertain, but several ideas have been proposed. One is that the "Eccles" place-name is derived from the Romano-British "Ecles" or "Eglys", itself derived from the Ancient Greek "Ecclesia". Following the arrival in AD 613 of the invading Anglo-Saxons at Lancashire, many existing British place-names, especially rivers and hills (the River Irwell for example), survived intact. The root "Ecles", found in several village names, is an exception to
Eccles, Greater Manchester this. A popular theory is that the word denoted the site of a building recognised by the Anglo-Saxons as a church and feature of the landscape. Eccles appears to have been such a village, and "Ecles" may be the likely source of the modern name. In Kenyon's "Origins of Lancashire" (1991), however, the author suggests that this may not be the case as there is not an exact correlation between "Eccles" place-names and pre-"Domesday" hundreds in south Lancashire. Pre-historic finds in the parish of Eccles include dugout boats found at Barton-upon-Irwell, an arrowhead, a spear and axes at Winton, which