I think that you can see that John Smeaton, engineer on this stretch of the Calder & Hebble Navigation, had previously worked on lighthouses. This 250 year-old stonework withstood the ravages of the Storm Ciara floods in February last year, but the spillway and the island were scoured away. A £3 million repair project took a year to complete, delayed by the coronavirus outbreak.
On our school cross country, my friend John and I used to jog – or more probably saunter – through this echoey underpass beneath the railway. As we were wearing our football kit we could imagine that it would be something like this in the tunnel at Wembley on Cup Final day. Not that we were keen on football: for me 90 minutes wandering along the school cross country route was preferable to running up and down the pitch. We knew all the short cuts, so we didn’t have to run all the way.
We cross the Calder here, at Healey Mills, but at that time there was a riveted steel footbridge, now replaced by this box girder bridge.
Our cross country route took us down the hill behind the gasworks and through the hamlet of Healey Mills. At that time people lived in this small terrace at the entrance to the mill yard.
We sometimes had a bit extra to our route because the school playing fields were another quarter of a mile from the school in South Ossett.
