FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

Where the railway passes in front of Gisburn Park, now a private hospital, the owners of the house insisted that it should pass through a tunnel so it was hidden from view from the house. Those were the days when the landowners had the whip hand!

[plaques]

They also said that the parapet should be castellated.

[Stanley]

That's correct P, it passes under the drive just inside where the lodge used to be.



Here's the 1892 map.

[Stanley]

This 1717 map of Bracewell shows one of the open field systems on Heber. We forget now that this was the accepted method of allocating farmland to tenants on an estate like that at Bracewell. Some plots were allocated to support charity and one at Bracewell was dedicated to financing the maintenance of the bells and ropes at the church. These were called 'doles'. Incidentally, that's the origin of the name commonly given to unemployment benefits in the sense that they were 'charity'. Notice that another common designation is 'butts' and for that reason I suspect that this, rather than archery, was the origin of Butts in Barlick. I have no definitive proof but there are many small pointers towards this and no direct evidence of archery practice.

[Stanley]

John Clayton used one of my pics to illustrate a possible early feature at Bancroft. This was in about 1980 when the mill had been demolished but no building had been done.

[Stanley]

It never surprises me when people forget about old features. The last picture is a case in point. Gillian's Beck dives into a culvert just behind the buildings up the road and came down to the mill lodge via a brick lined culvert. This was an adequate size except in very wet weather and the main problem was that the grating protecting the top end of the culvert used to get blocked by trash and the beck flowed across the fields until it dropped into the dam like a waterfall.



Here's what it looked like one wet day in 1977.

When the mill was demolished I too the trouble to go and see the Planning Officer at Pendle and pointed out the problem to him. I said that to avoid it they should do away with the grill and install two 4ft diameter concrete pipes under the road and reroute the beck down the field at the other side of the road as the existing culvert from the dam was in bad condition. He and his aide listened politely and told me they would consider it but nothing happened. They built houses on the land immediately above the mill site and you've guessed it, one day the water flowed though it. I don't know what steps they have taken since but it's quite amazing how much water can come down off the moor. Remember July 1932!

[Stanley]

There's another forgotten corner in that pic of the flood. If you look carefully there are huts and stored weft skips and boxes in the field above the mill. This was where all the debris came from which blocked the culverts on this side of the town and at the time it was blamed on Bancroft but this was unfair, none of their boxes and skips were outside. What you can see above the mill is the yard that Wild Brothers transport used for many years and this was the source of the blockages. Long forgotten but not by us!

[Tizer]

The 50th anniversary of the great flood of Trull (July 1968) will soon be noted in an event at the village hall. Five inches of rain fell on the Blackdown Hills in 24 hours and rushed down the Sherford Stream to Trull but what caused the most trouble was hay bales being washed into the flood and blocking the bridge.

[Stanley]

Old woodcut of a pole lathe used for turning wood in the 14th century. At one time Barlick was famous for being an area that produced large timbers and I have a reference from the accounts of Bolton Priory for a wood turner and wagon maker called Johanne le Tourneur. (John Turner). This is a forgotten corner now but at one time in the late 19th century Ouzledale Mill was a sawmill.



1853 map of Ouzledale Mill.

[Stanley]

1892 map of the same area. The object of interest here is the building which has appeared next to Gillian's Beck on Gillian's Lane (Colne Road). We know it today as a small holding developed by Young Sid Demaine but when first built it was a tannery. Tanneries need plenty of water and produce a lot of noxious waste which is most conveniently got rid of by dumping it into the beck. I've never seen any reference to pollution in the beck but I think that we can be sure that when the tannery was working the beck below it would be heavily polluted at times.
Incidentally, if you look at where Ouzledale Dam meets Longfield lane there is a triangular piece of land reclaimed from the dam which by this time was silting up as the water power resource was no longer used at the mill. In the eastern corner there is a small building. This was the yard used by Paul Brydon after he moved his 'marine store' from the bottom end of Commercial Street. 'Marine Store' was a euphemism for a rag and bone merchant's premises. So this yard was a recycling centre!

[Stanley]

Look again at the map. Recognise that Longfield Lane and its extension Forty Steps existed long before the mills were built, what puzzled me was why it was there!



Then I noticed the field behind Bancroft Mill was called Causeway Carr.



I went up on the hill and sure enough, there was the trace of a track heading straight down the hill. This made me dig even further and led to my recognition that what we had was a Bronze Age track and Forty Steps and Longfield Lane were part of it. Just imagine the traffic moving over it 3,000+ years ago, a lot of the trade was gold from Ireland to the Baltic States! The track has never been the same for me since.

[PanBiker]

There was a Bronze Age axe head recovered from that very field, I think around 1986. It's nicely decorated with a punched design, it's in the Craven Museum at Skipton.

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Ian, If I knew about it I had forgotten.
Once you start looking into the history of the track you become aware of the big feature at Middop.



Here's the map.



And here's John Clayton's picture of some of the enormous earthworks. Often described as a Bronze Age Fort it's more likely to have been a trading station with defensive capabilities I think. Outside the manor but definitely part of our forgotten history.

[Tizer]

For those interested in archaeology, short versions of some of the latest articles in Current Archaeology magazine are here: LINK

[Stanley]

Clitheroe had a real Norman castle



Barlick had Castle View up Manchester Road. I puzzled over this name for years.

[Stanley]

Then my friend John Clayton got interested in LIDAR and went on a course at his own expense to learn how to interpret the results. See THIS Wikipedia article on the technique. He started to come up with interesting results and shared them with us on the site.



He found very strong evidence that the square feature on this map bounded by Blue Pot Lane, Park Road, Back Lane (Now Philip Street) and what is now Manchester Road is almost certainly a Roman Fort. All the evidence fits and I have enough confidence in the strength of the folk memory to accept that the name Castle View is an old memory of the fort it faced. Never underestimate the power of the folk memory! I shall accept this explanation until someone comes up with something more convincing!

[Wendyf]

Do you have a copy of John's latest book Stanley?

Looks like it's out of print already.

[Tizer]

John's own web page is still showing it. He's probably self-publishing and needs to print some more. Barrowford Press Amazon and other booksellers often put up notices saying `Not currently available' without any explanation why.

[Wendyf]

John only sells through Amazon, or local outlets like the Pendle Heritage Centre.

[Stanley]

No, I haven't seen it Wendy. I shall have to mail him......
Done....... I'll let you know what happens.
He also looked at habitation patterns in the district and found lots of evidence for significant occupation patters out to the north of Barlick that we hadn't a clue about. All the pointers were towards much more settlement than is obvious now, He also found a good candidate for my Saxon Church at Calf Hall.....

[Stanley]

Wendy, the book is available and my copy will be delivered this week. It's Amazon who are playing silly buggers.....



Butts beck on 28 July 2013. This is a forgotten corner at the moment!

[Wendyf]

Glad you are getting your book Stanley, as usual it is packed with fascinating information including sites in Barlick, Earby and Kelbrook.

[Tizer]

...It's Amazon who are playing silly buggers.....

As always. When we were publishing they used to put our books on their web pages but would always say something like `Not available at present' or even give an impression that they were out of print. It's all because we sold our books direct to customers and didn't give discounts to third parties and we didn't need need Amazon, they sold well enough worldwide through our web site without help from them. It's probably the same for John, they'll want him to give them 30% or more discount.

[Stanley]

I think he's too old a dog for that.....

[Stanley]

John is coming this morning at 09:23...... I know. But that's what he said!
The hot weather triggered thoughts of what it must have been like in the days before mains water as many of the surface water springs that supplied a lot of water sources slowly dried up. The saying was "You never miss the water 'til the well runs dry!" We forget this and I'm afraid most people don't realise how lucky we are.....