Otter spraints neatly deposited on a mooring bollard by the canal at the Bingley Arms, Horbury Bridge. I’ve yet to see one of the otters but I was told that they’d been picked up on security cameras near the river.
Otter Spraints
Category: Canal
Coal Staith
Remains of an old coal staith, a loading bay for barges, on the west side of Balk Lane bridge over the Calder and Hebble Navigation It served the former Hartley Bank Colliery, which closed in the late 1960s.
The curved parapet of the bridge was originally capped by gently curved coping stones to prevent the tow-ropes of horse-drawn barges getting snagged. At this bridge you could have turned around the barge – and filled it up at the coal staith – without disconnecting the tow-rope.
Further upstream to the west approaching Horbury Bridge the canal passes a cutting so on this stretch towed barges heading upstream and downstream must have had some way of passing each other.
Coal Staith, Hartley Bank
From my 1964-65 negatives, this is one of the two coal staithes (loading bays) at Hartley Bank Colliery.
The original (left) was in such a poor state that I’ve coloured it to make it more readable.
The same scene today is more green and rural, so I’ve superimposed my original 50 mm 127 frame on a wide angle iPhone shot of the same view today, taken from the bridge at the bottom of the Balk.
Apologies to ‘Ghosts of Horbury’ on our Horbury and Sitlington History Group Facebook page. I now realise how difficult it is to match up the perspective!
Summer River
Stonecrop, viper’s bugloss, marsh woundwort, bream, banded demoiselle and a family of swans on our walk alongside the canal and the Calder today. Now we’re past midsummer’s day racken and bramble have grown up shoulder high, trees are in full leaf and on the riverside path, tall grasses are going to seed
Butterbur
Butterbur and kingcups are in flower in a small stream or drainage ditch between the sewage works and the end Industrial Street at Horbury Junction. A fresh-looking peacock butterfly feeds on dandelions alongside the canal.
Mooring Ring
The bridge at the end of the Balk over the Calder & Hebble Canal, Addingford, and a mooring ring on Beeston Bridge, by the Strands, Horbury Bridge.
Figure of Three
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.
Branched Bur-reed
As we walk down the Balk from Netherton on a still, grey Sunday morning, the only sound coming across the Calder Valley is the peel of bells from the spire of Horbury’s Georgian Church of St Peter’s. The bells were recast a year ago and we can hear the difference in harmony. Not that I thought they were out of tune before but there was a bit of a clanking abruptness when they were ringing; the arpeggios are smoother now.
On the bank of the stream at the lower end of The Balk, ivy stems climb the trunk of this ash tree as luxuriantly as a strangler fig in a rain forest.
Branched bur-reed, Sparganium erectum, grows by the canal bank, alongside The Strands, in the valley at Horbury Bridge. After engineering work to repair locks and drains damaged by flooding in February last year, the Canal & River Trust did some dredging along this stretch of the Calder and Hebble Navigation. Floating vegetation and marginals have soon colonised this quiet stretch but now most Covid restrictions have been lifted, we’re seeing more narrowboats, which help keep it clear.
A little further along, where trees grow alongside the canal, Mycena fungi grow on the stump of a sawn-off alder growing from the bank.
A Long Ramble at Addingford, 1962
A post about the Hartley Bank Colliery mineral railway on the Horbury and Sitlington Facebook page today prompted me to go up into the attic to look out this spread from the spring of 1962. This must have been the first time that my brother Bill and I explored so far in Addingford, with our friends, the Cassidy brothers, Steven and David. We dressed for the occasion, armed with a couple of garden canes and with two of us wearing World War II tin hats.
I’m glad still to have these exercise books, but unfortunately they don’t often take a diary form like this: I was more likely at that time to be turning the latest Biblical epic into a cartoon strip. I drew hundreds of Roman soldiers. Having said that, I have a complete run of diaries from my Grammar School years.
“It may not have been a long walk we went on but when we were back we had the benefit of playing commandos and learning how to swing on trees, seeing frogs mating, toads and a canal salvage boat in action.”
My summing up of the ramble (spelling corrected), spring, 1962
I don’t mention it in my comic strip but ‘learning how to swing on trees’ reminds me of an occasion, perhaps later that day, when all four of us were swinging over a water-filled ditch by the canal near our ‘Frogtown’. I ended up in the water and stormed off back home on my own, blaming Steven for my downfall.
Notes on the Panels
Panel 1: Gathering together at the end of our driveway, Smeath House, Jenkin Road, Horbury. Our family lived in the ground floor flat, the Cassidys in the first floor.
Panel 2: Setting off via Grove Road, crossing Westfield Road and down Addingford Lane (the A642 Southfield Lane Horbury bypass was constructed a few years later).
Panel 3: Addingford Drive hadn’t been built at the top of the slope, so the woods and scrub alongside Addingford Steps, with steep paths running through them were ideal for a game of commandos.
Panel 4: Crossing the bridge over the railway, the footway alongside the Hartley Bank mineral railway and the bridge over the canal at the foot of the Balk.
Panel 5: The open-ended shed is one of the coal loading bays alongside the canal at Hartley Bank Colliery.
Panel 6: Repairs to the canal. They did a good job: over half a century later, these interlocking steel sections are still holding up this section of the canal bank.
Panel 7: Steven.
Panel 8: Welder at work, note the goggles.
Panel 9: I think that this is my brother striding by in the foreground with long socks, short trousers and yellow pullover.
Panel 10: ‘Frogtown’, a notch cut in the canal bank to allow coal barges using the British Oak loading chute to turn around. This effectively cut off a stretch of a public right of way. The route of the footpath is still marked on the OS map but, 60 years later, the route hasn’t been reinstated.
Goldfinches
We’ve recently started feeding the birds again after taking a break over the summer. This was partly to reseed the bare patch in the lawn trampled by the pheasants that had spent so long pacing about in tight circles below the feeders, pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts but also because two or three small mounds of earth had appeared at the edge of the lawn.
We thought that this might be a sign that brown rats were moving in but a neighbour has since told me that at that time there was a lot of mole activity in his garden, which is the most likely explanation as there were only piles of soil but no sign of any entrance holes.
Today the feeders were visited by coal tits, blue tits, great tits, nuthatch and greenfinch but outnumbering all of them were goldfinches. At one stage all eight perches on the feeders were occupied by them, with another ten on the ground below and six or seven waiting their turn in the branches of the crab apple.
Pigeon Food Pyramid
At breakfast time, a loose flock of wood pigeons flew over the house, followed later by a grey heron, which appeared to be struggling to clear our roof.
Top Predator
This evening down by the canal, a sparrowhawk perched briefly in a tree then flew off on its rounds. I suspect that a sparrowhawk killed the pigeon that we found on our back lawn a few days ago. It’s not going to be short of prey with so many wood pigeons about.