COLDWEATHER

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Stanley
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COLDWEATHER

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COLDWEATHER

I’ve been thinking a lot about Coldweather, the road from Blacko to Gisburn. In 1977 I came across a map of Whitemoor dated 1580 and it triggered me into researching it. Strictly speaking you might think that Coldweather isn’t part of Barlick and in modern terms you are right but I found out that this was not always the case.
In 1147 Henry de Lacy was a great landowner in the North of England due to grants to his family by the king after the Norman Conquest. In this year he granted Barnoldswick to Abbot Alexander of Fountains Abbey to enable his monks to build a monastery there. History gives us an account of the perambulation of the boundaries by Henry and his men before granting the charter of 1147 and noted that Admergill was part of Barnoldswick. The monks didn’t have a happy time in Barlick and by 1152 they had left and moved across to Kirkstall where they founded a more successful abbey and Barnoldswick became a grange of Kirkstall and remained so for the next 400 years. During the whole of this time, the boundary with the Forest of Blackburnshire was in dispute. The reason for this was that Henry de Lacy had made a mistake when he included Admergill in the Manor of Barnoldswick because it was actually the property of the king. So there is a Barlick connection and even though there was a dispute I feel comfortable including it in my tales about our local history.
I first became acquainted with the road when I came here out of the army in 1956 and became ‘Open all hours’ in the grocer’s shop at Sough. We ran a mobile shop and I visited two of the farms on Coldweather every week. As time went on I enjoyed working with another customer on Gisburn Old Track on the other side of the hill, Abel Taylor and his wife at Greenbank. So over the years I picked up quite a bit about the area and I think they might interest you.
Abel worked his farm with a horse, Old Dick, a big chestnut gelding but he had one piece of motorised equipment, a very old Austin ‘Heavy Seven’ car that had been converted into a small wagon and we used it for hay carting. It was unlicensed, had no brakes worth speaking of and no silencer or exhaust, in other words it was totally illegal to take it on the public road. However, Abel had relatives at Wheathead Farm on the road from Blacko to Roughlee and he decided we were going to help them with their hay harvest, crucial to winter survival. This was before silage came into vogue and it was a chancy business, the more help you could get the better.
It was decided that the old Austin would be a good tool to have down there, the only problem was getting it from Greenbank to Wheathead. What was needed was someone brave/stupid enough to get it there…..

Image

Abel Taylor’s Austin Heavy Twelve.
Stanley Challenger Graham
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Stanley
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Re: COLDWEATHER

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Bumped.....
Stanley Challenger Graham
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"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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Stanley
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Re: COLDWEATHER

Post by Stanley »

It's a good story and worth telling again! So it's bumped again.
Stanley Challenger Graham
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"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
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