YOU have to go to the pigeon lofts of Hart Common or the allotments of Blackrod to hear it at its most fluent nowadays. But there once was a time when folk round these parts talked proper.

It's still rife down Wigan way and in parts of Leigh, but if somebody talked real Lancashire in Bolton these days, most listeners would probably need a translator.

They wouldn't know where to turn . . . until now!

The Lancashire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore has dropped onto the BEN features desk -- and into the the lap of the last defiant exponent of the sacred Lanky tongue in the office.

By heck it's a cracker. And I'll tell thi summat owd marrah -- it's nobbut £7.95.

Words like that are all in this fascinating, fun book that really is a mine of information. Incidentally lots of words from the old mining days are in there too.

But it's not all about Lancashire dialect and slang. For instance. Look up the word Baker.

You'd expect to find "Man who made bread, often in a brick oven."

What you get is: "Baker, Hylda, born in Farnworth near Bolton in 1908 . . . became a stage comedienne etc. etc." They're all in there. The people who were funny because they were born into Lanky humour, the people like Sam Laycock who wrote brilliantly in the Lancashire dialect, the industries such as mining, textiles and farming that kept folk just above the bread line and the language that all of them used.

"It's not an academic book, but rather an affectionate tribute to the heritage of Lancashire and its people over the past three centuries," says its Preston-based author Dr Alan Crosby, an eminent North-west local historian. "It is a personal selection to entertain and inform."

It's a fond reminder of the days when bally-warch was a pain in the guts and Nurofen hadn't been invented for yead-warch.

Words that were once a part of the everyday vocabulary of cotton town Bolton are included with descriptions of what such processes as carding, tenting and scutching meant. And if you thought streaking was a modern day "spectacle" of Wimbledon or the cricket tests, think again.

Dr Crosby describes how a popular village custom in the Pennines in the 1800s was nude racing. Young men would bare all to race to the summit of a hill -- taking great care to avoid nettles and gorse bushes!!

There are explanations too how some of those prominent summits got their names -- such as Two Lads on the Smithills moors above Bolton.

Lancashire's linguistic and cultural traditions are as much a part of its heritage as the Co-op, Vimto and Uncle Joe's Mint Balls. Commercial sense has seen those three survive. Books like Alan Crosby's masterpiece should see that the rest survives too. Aw reet?

The Lancashire Dictionary is published by Smith Settle of Otley at £7.95 softback and £12.95 hardback.