There are plans to build 4 million homes on the green belt according to today’s Telegraph.
‘Sandstone causeway north west of Junction 39. Hawthorns and ash tree 8th March 1983.’
There’s a triangle of countryside at Broad Cut Farm, Calder Grove, near Wakefield, that has survived between to the river and the M1 where there’s a now plan to build a hundred of those homes plus 10 manufacturing units..
Google Maps 2024
The causey stone public footpath in my 1983 drawing was originally a colliery tram road, where horse-drawn trucks were taken to Hollin Hall Coal Staith just downstream from Broad Cut Lower Lock. There’s a row of six ‘Old Limekilns’ next to them.
1854 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, made available by the National Library of Scotland
The small building at ‘Th’ Owlet Lathe’ in the top right corner of the map was a dovecote.
I perched on the southbound side of motorway embankment in 1983 to draw it:
Room for 260 pairs of pigeons
A ruinous dovecote stans close to the motorway embankment at Owlet Laithes, just north of junction 39. It is built of handmade bricks on a ssandstone base which acted as a damp-course. The roof is of large Yorkshire stone (andstone) flags held on to a rough-hewn timber framework by wooden pegs.”
Unfortunately this old building disappeared within a few years of me drawing it.
Great celebrities who trod the boards at Horbury School:
David Munrow, early music historian
R. D. Woodall, local historian and head teacher
Jane McDonald, singer, who appeared as Snow White in a Pageant Players’ pantomime (she’s now starring in pantomimes at the London Palladium, so we taught her well!)
Sir Christopher Chataway, runner (one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister when he ran the first 4-minute mile), who officially opened the school in 1963 when he served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education in Harold Macmillan’s government
Allan Schiller, classical concert pianist
. . . and not forgetting:
My brother Bill who played a pirate on the Hispaniola in the Pageant Player’s performance of the Mermaid Theatre version of ‘Treasure Island’ (we used their scripts and Bill told me that one of them was dotted with odd doodles: we suspect it was the script Spike Milligan used when he played Ben Gunn)
My sister Linda, who played Lucy Lockit in the Ossett Grammar School production of ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ (a new assembly hall was under construction at Ossett so they used Horbury’s stage for several years)
And me. I never performed on stage but I painted scenery for the Pageants for 40 years and, as a young member of the Horbury Concert Society, I illustrated and designed posters, leaflets and programme covers, including those for David Munrow and Allan Schiller
Happy birthday to Zac, who may get tread the boards at Horbury Academy in the next few years.
Link
Jane MacDonald, singer and BAFTA award winning TV presenter
A rainy morning’s walk on the shores of Buttermere is the perfect opportunity to try out our new Craghoppers’ AquaDry Waterproof Systems jackets. It’s a tough contest, as we’re just five miles from Seathwaite, in Borrowdale, the wettest inhabited place in England, which gets 11 feet of rain in a year. Most of it this morning.
High Stile
High Stile looms out of the low cloud as we walk through Burtness Wood on the south-west shore of the lake. High Stile, at 807 m, 2,648 ft, is topped with Eagle Crag Sandstone, a sandstone derived from volcanic rock, from the Ordovician Period, 450 million years ago.
Ennerdale Granite
Ennerdale Granite
Sourmilk Gill cascades down the hillside at the lower end of the lake eroding into the medium-grained Ennerdale Granite.
Felspar crystals give the rock its fleshy pink colour. Shards of dark ‘country rock’ – a geological term for the surrounding rock – were incorporated into the molten intrusion of granite as it forced its way upwards. Some of these fragments appear to be partially melted and the top fragment has a lighter halo around it.
These fragments are called xenoliths, from the Greek meaning ‘strange stone’.
Crottle
Crottle lichen
Crottle, also known as the salted shield lichen, Parmelia saxatilis, is a green-grey lichen here growing amongst mosses on bark.
Network of white veins on crottle, Parmelia saxatilis.
If you look closely you’ll see a network of white veins on its upper surface. Crottle was used to produce a reddish brown dye, used in Harris Tweed.
Looking north from the lower end of the lake towards Whiteless Pike and Grasmoor.
Snockrigg
From the furthest slope in this photograph we’re looking north across the lake towards:
High Snockrigg
Low Snockrigg
High Bank
and Pike Rigg along the shore of the lake
Snoc is ‘a projecting piece of land’. Rigg means ‘ridge’.
Polypody Fern
Growing amongst polytrichum ‘haircup’ mosses, a polypody fern.
Common Polypody
Common Polypody Fern, Polypodium vulgare, doesn’t have glossy fronds . . . except when its raining.
A beck in Burtness Wood.
And talking about rain, I’m afraid that the Craghoppers’ Aquadry jackets didn’t live up to their name. Discussing it with a local we feel that the Lake District rain managed to get in via the seams, so an additional improvement might be – in addition of the dual layer waterproof membrane of the AquaDry system – to tape the seams.
Our jackets have always stood up to the worst that Yorkshire can throw at them but Lakeland rain is something above and beyond that.
But we did finish our walk at the perfect place for drying out . . .
Sykes Farm
Wherever you go in the Lake District there’s an opportunity to see the local rocks in the walls. I’m guessing that the opaque white mineral under the tea room sign is fluorite.
Herdwick Wool
Yesterday we caught the opening day of Ian Lawson’s exhibition ‘Native Spirit, The Herdwick’ at the Rheged Gallery which, alongside the stunning photographs, included these samples of Herdwick wool, dyed in colours that you can see all around you in the Lake District landscape.
Colliery spoil heaps were once such a prominent feature of our local landscape that it never occurred to me to photograph one but this example, at the top end of Coxley Valley, featured as a stand in for an extinct volcano in our 1966 Indiana Jones-style mini-movie ‘Quest Coxley’.
That’s my friend John as the intrepid explorer clutching the cavalry sword he used to hack through the dense undergrowth of New Hall Wood.
Settling Pond
Today at the same footbridge you’re entirely surrounded by woodland and the spoil heap itself has been landscaped to create a gentler slope.
The banking at the foot of the spoil heap in the 1966 photograph was the dam wall of a settling pond constructed to prevent sediment discharging into Coxley Beck. It has now almost completely silted up. In the 1980s it attracted hundreds of mating toads in springtime and hopefully it still does.
Fire break?
OS Six-inch to the Mile map, 1930. National Library of Scotland, colour added by me in Photoshop.
The footbridge over Stony Cliffe Beck is top centre in this map from 1930. Denby Grange Colliery was then called the Prince of Wales Colliery. One feature in the old map that isn’t obvious when you’re walking through what is now Stonycliffe Wood Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve is the band devoid of trees across the top of the map: a fire break?
Our ‘Quest Coxley’ travelogue was just one minute long, so that’s about 12 feet of Standard 8 cine film at 18 frames a second. In Photoshop I’ve stitched together 20 frames from a second or two of a panning shot to make the panorama.
A smelter, a cook, a domestic servant and a chauffeur. Joseph, Hannah, James and Helena – my great uncles and aunts – stand alongside my Grandad Robert on the back row of the c.1904 photograph of the Bell family of Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire, which I’m currently researching.
The handwriting that I’ve added is that of the 1891 census enumerator for Lound, John Wragg, 54, Certificated Teacher at the School House, Sutton-cum-Lound Church of England School.
If you’re standing in the queue for the Science Museum on Exhibition Road you might spot this inscription above the large and imposing archway opposite:
SCIENCE AND ART DEPARTMENT SCHOOLS ** MUSEUM A.D. 1852
The date is misleading because the building – now the Henry Cole Wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum – was constructed between 1899 and 1909.
I was seven years old when I first joined the queue at the Science Museum (I can be sure of the date because I remember a poster for Kirk Douglas’s film ‘The Vikings’ – released in August 1958 – on hoardings around the Natural History Museum gardens).
The Royal College of Art
At that time there was an arts and crafts-style mosaic in the frame to the right of the archway. Several muses reclined elegantly beneath an inscription indicating that this was then the ‘Royal College of Art’.
Happy birthday to James. We’ve both done the Ancestry.com DNA test recently and, would you believe it, I’ve discovered that I have a close male relative in East Lothian.
The only one of these television dramas and movies that I spotted filming on location in Wakefield was Alan Plater’s ‘The Biederbecke Affair’ (1985) in a sequence where James Bolan and Barbara Flyn’s characters were driving their battered yellow Bedford van round and round County Hall.
My Great Aunt Sarah, was born in the year that the Penny Farthing Bicycle was invented and died in the year that the first man walked on the moon. She lived to celebrate her 97th birthday, but sadly although she lived just up the road from my Grandad Robert Bell, her younger brother, I don’t remember ever having met her.
My Great Uncle Ernest spent much of his career working underground as a ‘coal getter’ and ‘hewer’ but in retirement he described his former profession as ‘Farmer’.
Ernest Bell was born at Blaco Hill Cottages, near Lound, Nottinghamshire on 22 August 1869. In the 1881 census, aged 11, he is already working as an agricultural labourer.
Mexborough
On 9 November 1891 he married factory hand Elizabeth Cunningham of Mexborough, daughter of Harriet Cunningham, widow, and her llate husband John, a waterman. Mexborough lies 20 miles to the north-east of Blaco Hill in the Don Valley, mid-way between Sheffield and Doncaster. Ernest is working as a ‘miner’, later (1901) describing himself as a coal hewer.
The witnesses are John’s brother George William Bell and Elizabeth’s younger sister Edith, 18, who worked as a servant in a beerhouse.
He and his wife Elizabeth have five children, Ellen aged seven and her four younger brothers: Ernest, 5, George William, 3, Charles, 1, and James, aged 4 months. All were born in Mexborough.
In addition to the children, they have lodgers: fellow coal hewer Harry Smith, a widower from Worcestershire, and his seven-year old daughter Harriet.
Ernest and Elizabeth were married for 18 years and had 9 children, of which 6 survived but by 1911 George is a widower with a fifth son, Robert, aged 4 to look after. Agnes Knott, 50, born in Belper, Derbyshire, has moved in as ‘housekeeper’.
The Barnsley-British Cooperative Society
Google Street view (2022) of the George and Dragon and George’s Buildings, 1878, Church Street, Mexborough.
The Co-op warehouse, Mexborough and Swinton Times February 17, 1928
By 1921 Ernest has married Agnes and they’ve moved to Church Street, Mexborough. Ernest now works as a labourer for the Barnsley British Cooperative Society. The society had a warehouse at Mexborough and a pencilled note on the census form suggests to me that Ernest worked on the ‘Engine’ – presumably a stationary steam engine – there.
Google Street view (2020) of John and Edith’s house on Arnold Crescent, Mexborough.
In the 1939 Survey Ernest is now married to Edith, born 16 April 1891. They’re living at Arnold Crescent, Mexborough, and he describes himself – despite spending so many years as a coal hewer and as a labourer at the co-op – as ‘Old Age Pensioner, Farmer’. Edith is a ‘Housewife’.
