Eccles () is a town in the City of Salford in Greater Manchester, England, west of Salford and west of Manchester, split by the M602 motorway and bordered by the Manchester Ship Canal to the south. The town is famous for the Eccles cake. Eccles grew around the 13th-century Parish Church of St Mary. Evidence of pre-historic human settlement has been discovered locally, but the area was predominantly agricultural until the Industrial Revolution, when a textile industry was established in the town. The arrival of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway led to the town's expansion along the route of the track linking those two cities. History Toponymy The derivation of the name is uncertain, but two suggestion have been proposed. The received one is that the "Eccles" place-name is derived from the Romano-British Ecles or Eglys ("eglwys" in Welsh means "church"), which in turn is derived from the Ancient Greek Ecclesia via the Latin. Following the arrival in AD 613 of the invading Anglo-Saxons in 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, could be an example of this. So, the suggestion is that the word denoted the site of a building, or a ruin featuring the landscape, which was recognised by the Anglo-Saxons as a church. Eccles would then have been a village founded around one such, and so Ecles may be the likely source of the modern name. In Kenyon's Origins of Lancashire (1991), however, the author casts doubt on the further suggestion that native British Church administration survived into Anglo-Saxon times, as there is not an exact correlation between "Eccles" place-names and pre-Domesday hundreds in south Lancashire. An alternative etymology is derived from that known to belong to Eccles in Kent, recorded as "Aiglessa" in the Domesday Book of 1086 and so conclusively deriving from the Old English (pre 7th Century) "aec-laes" meaning "oak pasture". Early history 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 taken together appear to suggest the existence of a hunting and travelling society. Human habitation in the area may extend as far back as 6000 BC, with two separate periods of settlement on Chat Moss, the first around 500 BC and the second during the Romano-British period. The village may