The World Before

[jacey]

I 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.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The past is not always another country. It's right beneath our feet.

Or, as William Faulkner said it, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

I love reading these. Year round habitation of my home town doesn't even go back two hundred years. (The Native Californians who lived here lived by the coast winters only, moving inland during the summer, harvesting the sea and wetlands during the rich winters and grooming the oak meadows during the summers).

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

We once played a gig at Niagara on the Lake at what they described as 'historic Fort George, built 1812,' and I privately thought, 'Our house is older than that.' I expected stone walls, but when I got there it was a fort with a timber pallisade that looked like a 'wild west' Davy Crockett type fort like the ones I'd seen on movies. (Yes, OK I know it was Canada, but, y'know...) That put the whole thing into perspective for me. Our house and the period that 'cowboy' movies were set in were (more or less) each other's contemporaries. I'd never really tied the two halves of my history together before. I mean, I knew, intellectually, but I didn't completely grok it until that moment.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Most cowboy movies are set in a later period though. The Lesatherstocking type movies are in that poeriod, but the "home on the range" type stories are mostly post-Civil War. The big cattle drives and the train robberies and all that were largely staffed by detritus from the Confederacy.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

My Dad loved westerns of all kinds and I watched so many cowboy (and similar) movies on Sunday afternoon TV in my misspent youth that I've probably seen the whole gamut from Santa Fe Trail type stories, early John Wayne, Shane and Battle of the Alamo to How the West Was Won, as well as more recent 'range' movies like Silverado and, of course, epics like Last of the Mohicans. I probably mix up a whole span of history since I guess I can't rely on Hollywood for historical accuracy.
:-)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Great stuff - knowing the place, it's great to see something of its past.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I did quite a lot of local history research in the 80s and 90s. (not so much now because of time constraints) but I accumulated a lot of old photos and - I guess - am the repository for whatever local history archive might be found in the village. Of the four of us who were in our little local history group in the 80s there are only two of us surviving, and Shirley, though still in the village, isn't into it any more. Maybe she figured since the other two died young (44 and 51 respectively) is wasn't such a healthy pursuit.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Simply magical.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I adore that picture of the anonymous chap standing by the Forty Steps. The composition is just lovely. The steps are still there today (it's a public footpath).