![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The World Before
Jun. 6th, 2014 07:41 pmI responded to a post in Jaine Fenn's blog 'Tales from the Garret' and realised that it makes a perfectly sensible blog post on its own, so here it is, tweaked, and with added local history photos.
It's fascinating how the world we live in has layers from the world before.
BB and I live in a sort of cottage with later accretions, possibly built about 1800 - it's hard to tell because bits of it certainly were and bits weren't. The new extension is about 1890 - anyhow, I digress...
In the first pic our house is hidden behind the clump of trees just to the left of marker point A, which is our road. If you look very carefully you can see smoke from a domestic chiumney trickling up from just behind the trees.
So...
Step out of our front door and turn left up the lane. (The start of the lane is marked A on the first pic - taken about 1905.) In less than a hundred yards the tarmac peters out into a farm track between dry stone walls. In a quarter mile or thereabouts the far end of the track rejoins a spiderweb of narrow country lanes at Five Lane Ends which is just about on the hotrizon.
Cross over, more or less direct, and follow your nose up and over the ridge and down the steep twist to a pub (which has suffered many inappropriate name changes, but used to be called The Junction). There, at Gate Foot, the old road intersects with a newer 'turnpike' road, laid down by entrepreneurs in the late 1700s. Ignore the turnpike and cross over. Up another twisty lane (praying you don't meet a tractor because it's barely wide enough for two small cars to pass) and you crest the hill at Snowgate Head (uncharmingly pronounced Snoggit 'Ead, locally). From there you twist again and drop down into New Mill, past the church, which you can't even see from the turnpike road, the bypass of its day.
This little twisty lane used to be the main coach road from Birdsedge to New Mill and - beyond it - Holmfirth, and from there up and over Holme Moss to the Woodhead Pass, over the Pennines, an inhospitable 11 mile crossing into North Derbyshire and Lancashire that you probably didn't want to attempt in winter except, perhaps, with a native guide and a sturdy pack-horse.
The main road through our village is another turnpike road - one actually built by Blind Jack of Knaresborough (Thomas Telford) which is a name I recall from junior school history projects without ever expecting to live so close to one of his actual roads. If you stand outside our front door and look to the right, down the hill, and imagine the main A629 isn't there, you can see the tiny track that shows the continuation of this 'main road' in the opposite direction. (Just to the left of B in the first pic) There are still traces of it between dry stone walls as it passes (C) a farm of unknown age (datestone 1642, but that may have been for alterations) and continues up to Quaker Bottom (along the line of the stone wall a D) where it is lost.
There's a footpath continuing from Quaker Bottom, but not a 'road' suitable for horsedrawn vehicles, so at that point the new road and the old road may well run along the same track.
The past is not always another country. It's right beneath our feet.
It's fascinating how the world we live in has layers from the world before.
BB and I live in a sort of cottage with later accretions, possibly built about 1800 - it's hard to tell because bits of it certainly were and bits weren't. The new extension is about 1890 - anyhow, I digress...
In the first pic our house is hidden behind the clump of trees just to the left of marker point A, which is our road. If you look very carefully you can see smoke from a domestic chiumney trickling up from just behind the trees.
So...
Step out of our front door and turn left up the lane. (The start of the lane is marked A on the first pic - taken about 1905.) In less than a hundred yards the tarmac peters out into a farm track between dry stone walls. In a quarter mile or thereabouts the far end of the track rejoins a spiderweb of narrow country lanes at Five Lane Ends which is just about on the hotrizon.Cross over, more or less direct, and follow your nose up and over the ridge and down the steep twist to a pub (which has suffered many inappropriate name changes, but used to be called The Junction). There, at Gate Foot, the old road intersects with a newer 'turnpike' road, laid down by entrepreneurs in the late 1700s. Ignore the turnpike and cross over. Up another twisty lane (praying you don't meet a tractor because it's barely wide enough for two small cars to pass) and you crest the hill at Snowgate Head (uncharmingly pronounced Snoggit 'Ead, locally). From there you twist again and drop down into New Mill, past the church, which you can't even see from the turnpike road, the bypass of its day.
This little twisty lane used to be the main coach road from Birdsedge to New Mill and - beyond it - Holmfirth, and from there up and over Holme Moss to the Woodhead Pass, over the Pennines, an inhospitable 11 mile crossing into North Derbyshire and Lancashire that you probably didn't want to attempt in winter except, perhaps, with a native guide and a sturdy pack-horse.
The main road through our village is another turnpike road - one actually built by Blind Jack of Knaresborough (Thomas Telford) which is a name I recall from junior school history projects without ever expecting to live so close to one of his actual roads. If you stand outside our front door and look to the right, down the hill, and imagine the main A629 isn't there, you can see the tiny track that shows the continuation of this 'main road' in the opposite direction. (Just to the left of B in the first pic) There are still traces of it between dry stone walls as it passes (C) a farm of unknown age (datestone 1642, but that may have been for alterations) and continues up to Quaker Bottom (along the line of the stone wall a D) where it is lost.
There's a footpath continuing from Quaker Bottom, but not a 'road' suitable for horsedrawn vehicles, so at that point the new road and the old road may well run along the same track.The past is not always another country. It's right beneath our feet.
It's not old as English villages go. There are some old farmsteads dating back to the 1600s, and some cottages in the village show signs of having had weavers' galleries on the top floor (very recognisable by the windows), but the village as it is now didn't really spring into being until the industrial revolution brought the weaving trade out of the cottages and into the mills. I'm guessing most of the older houses (terraced cottages mostly) were built between 1770 and 1830. They were probably buit to house millworkers as the mill in the village grew. Most of them were one-up-one-down and according to the census returns people were raising families with eight or nine children in these tiny two-room houses. The ones nearest to the camera in the forst picture look to be two rooms deep, but we think they were originally built as back-to-backs. The ones furthest away from the camera are only one room deep. Yes, that's a gas lamp halfway along the row. These two pics were probably taken some time between 1905 and 1911. The building that sticks forward on to the roadside furthest from the camera is now the village hall, but it was then a school, built by two Quaker benefactors soon after the 1870 education act. It wasn't until 1911 that they built the current 'council' school.
The River Dearne rises behind our house and there's a small dam, which drains into a culvert beneath the road and thence into the mill dam proper. The undershot water wheel (once at the extreme left hand edge of the mill photo) is long gone, but the course of the mill race is still visible. More importantly, the mill dam in Birdsedge controls the water flow into the Dearne from here to Denby Dale, the next village down the valley. The Hinchliffe family, which owns the mill in Denby Dale, also owns the mill in Birdsedge, and I suspect the water flow is the main reason they've kept it going as a viable working mill. Of course the water isn't used for power in Denby Dale, but they do still actively dam it, so I expect it's used in some kind of process.
In a cottage-weaving situation several families would collaborate to buy one or two hand looms, and keep them working as long as there was light to see by (which in summer, in this part of the worlc, can be from 4.30 a.m. to 10.30 p.m.). Though some weavers' lofts were individual, some spanned several houses. I suspect that might be the case with the first three cottages here at Sunside. If you look carefully there are blocked up windows at either side of the upper ones (and at the back, too). Only the first three cottages were built as housing, the rest of the row was part of a farm range which was converted to three dwellings some time between 1905 and 1911. In an earlier photo you can quite clearly see a tall barn door where, in this picture, is a lighter patch of front wall. Barn conversions are not a new idea. (The farm house is part of the same structure, but is round the back)
You can see blocked up weavers' windows much more clearly on this 1960s photo of the back of Sunside cottages. Imagine the light in that gallery with a long row of mullioned windows at both the front and back of the gallery. Compare the size of the domestic windows downstairs where it was more important to keep heat in even if it meant shutting light out.
And here is the farm house. The photo is probably from the 1960s. It remains a farm - or rather a smallholding - to this day.
It's a bit more prosperous looking, but the top floor of what was the Crown Inn was obviously a weavers' gallery. The mullions of long-blind windows are still very obvious. I can see this building from my front window. It's still lovely and is now an artist's gallery rather than a weaver's one.