The Romans came first, building forts at Manchester, Lancaster, Ribchester, Burrow, Elslack and Castleshaw - administrative anchors in the territory of the Brigantes. After the legions left in 410, the area splintered between the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged in the north and Anglo-Saxon Mercia and Northumbria pushing in from south and east. The county itself was a Norman invention, gradually assembled out of Domesday holdings between the Ribble and the Mersey. In 1351 it became a county palatine, with its own judicial system, and to this day the Duchy of Lancaster - the private estate of the sovereign - administers parts of the historic boundary as if the rest of English local government reform never happened.

Then steam changed everything. From the late 18th century, soft water running off the West Pennine Moors powered the cotton mills of Bolton, Blackburn, Oldham, Burnley and a hundred smaller towns. The Lancashire Coalfield fuelled the boilers. Liverpool's docks shipped American cotton in and Lancashire cloth out. By 1971, the historic county held more than five million people - the most populous geographic county in the United Kingdom outside Greater London. The cotton is mostly gone now; what remains is the geography it left behind - tight rows of millworker terraces climbing valley sides, the stone shells of weaving sheds being converted into flats, and a regional accent that still carries the rhythm of looms.

The Red Rose of Lancaster is older than the county's flag and older than any of its mills. It was the badge of the House of Lancaster during the Wars of the Roses, the thirty-year struggle of dynastic civil war that ended in 1485 with a Lancastrian Tudor on the throne. "In the battle for England's head, York was white, Lancaster red," runs the verse. The cricketing and rugby league rivalries between Lancashire and Yorkshire are still framed as a Roses match six centuries later. The flag - a red rose on a gold field, designed by the Friends of Real Lancashire and registered in 2008 - flies on Lancashire Day, 27 November, including from buildings in parts of Manchester and Oldham long since absorbed into other counties.

The modern ceremonial county is a study in contrasts. The Fylde coast runs north from Lytham St Annes through Blackpool to Fleetwood - the cheerful, slightly threadbare resort coast where the Tower has stood since 1894. Inland the land climbs toward the West Pennine Moors and the Forest of Bowland, designated National Landscapes. Preston is the county town and now a city; Lancaster, the historic capital, has the castle, the priory, and the Ashton Memorial standing over them both. The food is unapologetically working-class: Lancashire hotpot, Eccles cakes, Goosnargh shortbreads, Bury black pudding, butter pies in Preston, and Beacon Fell Lancashire cheese with EU Protected Designation of Origin. The clotted accent that produced Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir William Walton, and most of the Beatles is still the sound of the place.