FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Wendyf]

The new road went past the new Stone Trough pub in 1824 Stanley, as far as the Craven Heifer in Kelbrook and bypassing the old Skipton Road through Hague and Old Stone Trough. Have a look at the 1853 map.

https://maps.nls.uk/view/102344851

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Wendy, so my memory was right and it was a trust road. Mrs Tordoff must haVE BEEN TELLING ME WHAT SHE WAS TOLD AS A CHILD, SHE COULDN'T HAVE SEEN IT BUILT. Another little corner cleared up!

[Wendyf]

But she would have seen the new bit built from the Craven Heifer round to Sough.... I'll have to go and look up the date.

It was 1929, so she certainly wouldn't have been a child then.

[Stanley]

Quite right Wendy and that was about the time of the advent of buses. They must have found the bridge by the church a bit of a challenge and the road would have been narrower then.



The church around 1900.



The Craven Heifer round about 1930. I wonder if the people are waiting for the bus?

[Stanley]

The winding road at Greenberfield locks was a case in point. Laycock's buses could just about negotiate the hump backed bridges and sharp bends. That's why the new road from Coates to Gill was built.
In case you are curious, this painting was posted by Harry Smith a along time ago.

[Nolic]

I remember walking to Coates with mi dad watching them build the road. I couldn't understand why this wasn't now called New Road as it was newer than the one from Barlick to Salterforth. Nolic

[Stanley]

Come to think, I don't know what it's called Comrade...... I've had a look at the modern street map and it's Skipton Road from Coates to Gill Brow and then Church Road from there into Thornton.



The view from Thornton Manor, winter 2017. Daughter Susan did the pic, she works as a carer there.



This used to be Kaye's Arms, a pub in Thornton. At one time the village was owned by Amos Nelson of Gledstone, the Nelson cotton manufacturer and he was red hot prohibitionist. He closed the pub down and did the same at West Marton.

[Stanley]

Briggs and Duxbury drawing of the proposed prisoner of war camp at 'Gisburn Corner'. This site was later bought by Vaux breweries of Sunderland who built what we knew for many years as the Coronation Hotel. In thge days before motorways when the Preston Road was the main route to Blackpool from the North East it was a very busy coaching halt during the holiday and Blackpool Lights season. Long gone now and replaced I am told by an 'Executive Homes' development.



This was another POW camp at West Marton.

[Stanley]

I noticed something yesterday when I was revisiting the POW camps. The B&D drawing is entitled 'Gisburn Corner House Café', From this I deduce that there was some sort of catering establishment there before the war and I am wondering whether Vaux bought the site and established a coach stop in the pre-war years and enlarged it when the site was returned to them after the war.
Funny how you can miss something like this for years......
If an historian in the NE is reading this, go to the Vaux records and see if you can enlighten us!

[Stanley]

Some things are so obvious we forget them. When the old railway sidings became redundant we could have ended up with a lot of things on the site, but what we got was The Green. It escaped becoming something akin to the dreaded 'retail park' because we are a backwater. For the same reason we have a stone-built town. We see it every day and forget how lucky we are. Look how a building like the fire station stands out like a sore thumb.

[Stanley]

In the days when we had a rail service one consequence was that due to a very efficient distribution network and even though there were no refrigerated vans, there was a daily supply five days a week (Tuesday until Saturday) of fresh fish packed in wooden crates in ice. In our case it came mainly from Fleetwood which was a busy fishing port then and was always on the early morning train together with the newspapers. This is the reason why most fish and chip shops were closed on Monday, common whatever early closing day was in the other shops, in Barlick this was Tuesday but doesn't seem to be as strict as it used to be under the regulations that ensured shop workers had some time off.
The system worked well and most towns and villages near the railway had wet fish shops. Today that need is served by a fishmonger's van in the square two days a week and I think he is based in Fleetwood as well. The advent of cheap refrigeration spelt the death of the wet fish shops, but I still like to get fresh fish when it's available. Captain Birds Eye has a lot to answer for!

[Bodger]

Chickens delivered by bus in cardboard boxes with ventilation holes,the driver would take them and deliver them to the next depot then on to where ever, try that today /

[Stanley]

Indeed Bodge!
Another traffic on the railway that worked well was the delivery of cattle by rail from the Scottish markets to multiple destinations down the country. John Harrison's dad William was a big buyer at Ayr market and there was a railway siding in the yard at the auction market, long disused when I was working out of there. John told me that William used to oversee the loading of his beasts at Ayr and then set off by car back to Earby. The cattle would arrive and be unloaded in the sidings at Earby shortly after he arrived home and they had a private way from the sidings into White House Farm which is next to what used to be the station. It was a very reliable service and never failed. All this in the days of hand-written way-bills and routing by human beings, no computers then.
Like the bus drivers, just imagine trying to do that today! Come to think the line isn't even there now, thank you Dr Beeching!

[Stanley]

Mention of White House Farm at Earby reminded me of this pic at White House Farm, Elslack. German POWs during the war. A bit of a contrast to how the Germans behaved with ours. Some of them met English girls and married them. Nice!

[Stanley]

One thing I often think about is the fact that until just before 1900 there were no paved streets in the town and very few stone pavements. I often think of the ladies in their very long dresses crossing the road. When you think about it the hems of their skirts must have been filthy, if not from actual contact with the mud, by splashes. I often wonder how they dealt with this. Remember also that the mud would have been a compound of every nasty you can imagine. Life is complicated today but at least we don't have that added problem.

[Stanley]

Fred Inman, gent and tackler at Bancroft.

Fred was an Earbier all his life and a lovely bloke. I kept in touch with him until he died in Cravenside at a good age. If you look in the LTP you can find his transcripts telling his life story. I still miss him.....

[Stanley]

The enormous railway viaduct at Stockport that carried the LNWR line over the river valley. As you can see from the electric overhead wires, I did this pic later in life but it was a dominant feature of my childhood not least because the Luftwaffe desperately wanted to destroy it as it carried the main line from the North to London. We lived less than half a mile from it and so it made life interesting in the earl;y part of WW2 when the Luftwaffe was at its height of effectiveness.(LINK)
Sorry we're not in Barlick this morning but it's looming large in my mind at the moment.

[Stanley]

Walmsgate in about 1900. The road is still dry macadam and what many people forget is that just at the bottom of Lamb Hill (Which must have been much steeper) is the Town Bridge. Actually it's a culvert carrying Gillian's Beck under the road which was raised about four feet. This was a major improvement in about 1850 as there used to be a ford there. Remember that this route down Colne Road was the main entry to the town from the South. The 'bridge' was paid for by selling off the old village green which was the land to the South of what is now Church Street and it explains why Wellhouse farm stood on the North side of the street.



During research into Butts I found evidence that suggested that Wellhouse Farm had land as far as the Model Joinery works and Taylor Street and was a substantial holding. It looks as though, after 1850 they sold off all the land for development as the town was expanding rapidly under the influence of the new Butts Mill and the arrival of steam weaving. The name Wellhouse Farm suggests that it also owned one of the major town wells. Orchard and Garden Streets behind the site also suggest they owned that land as well. The pic is at the end of the 19th century shortly before it was demolished, at that time it was the Post Office,



The town centre in 1853. Lots to study here!

[Stanley]

The Artisan's lodging house, always known as 'The Model' was built in 1911 by a local builder Bill Taylor according to Harold Duxbury. It was intended to accommodate the extra weavers needed in the town's booming mills. It was redundant in 1936 as the industry was shrinking and was bought by Briggs and Duxbury and converted into the Model Joinery Works. Still alive and well today of course. I wonder whether this was on Wellhouse Farm land as well? Harold says that B&D also bought land at the side of the building from Sam Yates the greengrocer who had a market garden and garages there.

[Stanley]

Today's forgotten corner is a bit left field. See THIS news item which is widely reported. It concerns falling sperm count in Western men.
I have often commented about the changes in retail in the town and the decline of old fashioned food shopping and cooking as more and more people embrace the 'Just Eat' concept. Add to this the decline in what we used to call manual labour , the availability of cars and the number of distractions in modern society that encourage sedentary behaviour. Add oestrogen contamination and the tiny but important emissions from modern paints and plastics and we have circumstances that are resulting in lower sperm counts.
So today's forgotten corner is the life style which kept us young lads fit and fertile! There were disadvantages in having to do hard physical work, some of us got back ache! But it seems now that there were benefits as well, all that exercise and home cooked grub was keeping us fit for purpose!
I don't know what the answer to this is, I don't see much prospect of us going back to the days when we knew that Manual Labour wasn't a Spaniard.

[Stanley]

This very distinctive shrub had been attracting my attention for many years because it flowered profusely all summer. When I did the research on the Whitemoor Map there was mention of a bush as a boundary marker and for a long time I thought it might be this one even though it couldn't possibly be over 300 years old. Eventually I did some serious digging and sent a pic to Kew. I was told it was an Olearia Hastii, a hybrid species first collected in New Zealand by a man called O'Leary in the late 19th century so it wasn't my boundary marker. But Kew told me it was unusual to find such a rare specimen so far north. Later I found another good specimen in Barlick near Letcliffe. I told the house owners how rare it was but unfortunately it didn't survive some improvements they did.
As far as I know, the specimen in the pic which is near Hollin Hall on the road to Blacko is still there, I hope so.



Eventually John Clayton and I found this solitary thorn at Hayn Slack and we think it might be a descendant of the boundary marker. It was evidently judged to be of some importance because of the way it is protected and walled.
Not ground-shaking but very satisfying!

[Stanley]

Here's a forgotten corner. I apologise because I didn't get a pic of this big ash tree before it was cropped. The trunk is enormous, I never measured it but it must be almost 8ft in diameter. I've often noted that the research indicates that at one time Barlick was a good source of large timber. This survivor proves that our district is capable of supporting the very largest trees. I wonder how many more giants there were?

[Stanley]

Commercial Street is a quiet little backwater these days but a century ago it was a very busy place. The row of buildings contained Brydon's 'marine store', rag and bone man actually, Singleton's carriage hire business and at the end, Briggs and Duxbury's carpenters shop. The basements of the buildings facing Butts Beck were used as slaughter houses by the town's butchers and there was a lot of stabling as well for some of the many horses needed to service the town.



Scores of carts like this would be going out on the days work every morning. Then there was the delivery of hay and straw and the carting out of the horse muck. Commercial Street was well named! Today we have a tattoo parlour.........

[Stanley]

Domestic coal deliveries were more easily done using a 4 wheeled wagon. These also were a common sight most usually working out of the coal yard in the sidings where bulk coal in railway wagons was bagged for sale. Before the railway this was on Coates Wharf but delivery in rail wagons was more convenient as the coal was already above ground level, only a small change but it made all the difference.



The entrance to the coal yard next to Croft House in Station Road in 1892.

[Stanley]

Before the days when the supermarkets took over sales of drink the town had a thriving pub trade and other outlets with an 'Off Licence'. Many pubs had an 'outdoor sales' entrance and this was mainly patronised by women buying a jug of beer either for themselves or their husband's meal time drink. Church Street was lined with pubs and 'Offies' , now there are only two pubs, the Fountains (Commercial Inn) and the Cross Keys. I doubt if actual consumption has fallen much apart from the proportion of beer which was the universal drink. This had been the case for centuries, one thing about beer was that the water had been boiled and the drink was safe which was more than could be said for the Town Wells.
Funnily enough I was reminded of this by the picture of the flat coal wagon above. Harold Duxbury once told me about a carter who delivered household coal who, when he left the coal yard, always called in at the Railway pub back door for a 'slape pint'. While he was in there his horse used to move forward to the end of Station Road and was at the door when the man came out that way. You can't train a motor to do that!



The Railway Inn in 2012 when it was still a pub, just.