I once asked a farmer in Scotland what the difference was between a tidy farm and an untidy one. He gave me a very short answer; “Two thousand tons of concrete!”. What he meant of course was that if yards, gateways and farm roads were paved it made life a lot easier. Can’t you just imagine a Stone Age wife nagging her husband to do something about the muddy entrance to the dwelling and him scattering stones to give a firm, drained area?
Exactly the same principle applied to public roads. When these first started as footpaths between settlements they were just bare earth. As traffic built up, the surface wore and in wet weather became a quagmire. It didn’t take long to realise that some stone on the road helped matters enormously. By medieval times, this maintenance of the roads by stoning them was part of the duty demanded by the manorial lord of his tenants. They had to give so much labour every year to road maintenance or suffer a fine.
This was done by ‘knapping’ stone into the road surface. If you took a reasonable sized stone, laid it on the road and then cracked it with a small pointed hammer it would shatter into small pieces and these were hammered into the road until they were level. If you walk up Lister Well Lane and look carefully you will find surviving areas of knapped stone. You can tell them because it almost looks like a mosaic.
Eventually traffic built up to the point where this method wouldn’t do, it was too time consuming. By the late 18th century crushed stone was being spread on the roads and there were laws which stated that wagon tyres had to be of a certain width so that as the vehicles travelled on the road they rolled them flat. These roads always seemed to be white if there was limestone in the area. I suspect that limestone shattered more easily than gritstone and was easier to use.
No matter how well they were maintained, these roads were dusty in dry weather and muddy when wet. This was no great problem on the open road but in villages and towns it became a serious nuisance. Imagine Church Street on a hot summer’s day. The wind or passing traffic stirred up the fine dust and blew it everywhere, into the shops and on to uncovered food stuffs. Remember that mixed in with this dust was horse and dog muck, the droppings off the scavenging and night soil carts and every other nastiness you can imagine. It was realised that this was a serious public health issue. By the end of the 19th century this problem was being tackled by paving the streets with stone blocks about nine inches square called ‘setts’.
If you want to see a nice piece of road history in Barlick, go and have a look at Hill Street. The slope at the bottom end down to Bank Street is still the original setts. If you look closely you will see the remains of the gas tar, a by-product of the gas works, which was poured into the joints to seal them when they were laid. One thing to note is that when they were laid, the setts weren’t rounded like they are now. They had rough faces and sharp edges, the rounded appearance you see today is the result of years of wear.
In very large towns wood blocks were used instead of stone as this quietened the sound of carriage wheels. A lot of streets in the City of London were paved like this. In the 1920s the first black top roads were constructed. The very earliest ones were made by simply spraying hot tar on the road and rolling fine stone into the soft surface. This is still used on country roads today. In towns, some streets were capped with Trinidad Lake Asphalt, a naturally occurring mastic which is still used to this day for flat roofs. As more roads were capped, tar macadam, a mixture of hot tar and small stones, was used and this is what we still see on modern roads.
The first streets in Barlick to be paved were in the town centre, Church Street, Rainhall Road, Station Road and Newtown were early examples. These were surfaced with a fan shaped pattern of setts and one of my pictures this week shows a remnant of this which was revealed when Rainhall road was re-surfaced eighteen months ago. The best example I know of this pattern is outside the Piece Hall at Halifax and a pavior once told me that the trade name for it is Durex. Funnily enough, Billy Brooks told me that when they were first paved, the local carters protested because their horses were slipping on the hard surface. It didn’t take long for the farriers to start making horseshoes with cleats at the back and front to give the horses a better grip.
One strange by-product of the tar boiler was that it came to be seen as a cure for whooping cough. I can still remember the lovely smell of hot gas tar from when I was a lad and many old people have told me of children being held over the boiler so that they got a good dose of the fumes to ease their cough. There are of course the tales about children struggling and falling into the hot tar but I have yet to find any firm evidence for this. Happily, I came across an old tar boiler only a week since so I can show you what one looked like. They always remind me of Stephenson’s Rocket!
So what’s all this got to do with Jack Platt and the quarries in Barlick? I’m setting the scene for the next thrilling instalment of his life story, The streets of Barlick, Barrowford, Nelson and Burnley weren’t paved with gold, they were covered with Tubber Hill setts. Next week we’ll have a look at how they got there.
SCG/23 March 2003
Setts in Newtown.
A tar boiler.