Tag Archives: industrial landscapes

Architecture, Country Walks Without a Car, History, Walking

Skipton Castle and Woods

July 22, 2021 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

A lovely, warm, sunshiney weekend everyone said, so off we went like the magical, spontaneous creatures we are. Minimal extras, as the spontaneous non-car life demands (but more about that later). A quick search of places not too far, well suited for country walks, with a train station and a reasonable room for two nights. Not the easiest of combinations to find, but Skipton was brilliant.

The land orginally belonged to Earl Edwin, son of Leofwine and brother to Leofric of Mercia according to an 1873 history of Skipton. This is mostly a rather boring account about lords and ladies, has some interesting lists of goods and lands taxed and the meaning of wealth. But I love this description of the castle’s founding:

After the forfeiture of Earl Edwin, the first grantee of his lands in Craven was Robert. de Romille, a Norman adventurer of ancient family. In his choice of a situation for the seat of his barony, Romille had nothing but the face of Nature to direct him. There had, unquestionably, been a Saxon manse at Bolton, for the occasional residence of the lord; but it was now dilapidated; and though the sequestration of that favoured place would have attracted a monk, and its beauties a man of taste, yet it wanted two of the first ingredients in the residence of an ancient baron—elevation and natural strength. These Romille found. on the brink of a perpendicular rock at Skipton, which furnished an impregnable barrier to the north; while a moderate declivity to the south, equally rocky, and therefore incapable of being undermined, afforded sufficient room for the enclosure of a spacious “bailley,” the ramparts of which would command the plain beneath.
The erection of this castle elevated the place at once from a poor dependent village to a respectable town. In times of turbulence and disorder, the inhabitants of the adjoining country would crowd for protection under its walls. Many privileges also would be granted by the lords, many advantageous offices enjoyed by their immediate dependents…
— An extract from the History and Antiquities of the Deanery of Craven in the County of York by Thomas Dunham Whitaker, 3rd Edition Published in 1878

Skipton Castle is splendid, increasingly well-fortified over the years to defend against incursions by the Scots by the Clifford family, whose principal family seat it served until 1676. Of Lady Margaret Russell (1560-1616), who married George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland in 1577, the website states: ‘deeply interested in alchemy she discovered many excellent medicines‘. Looking her up I didn’t find much more about that, but she was also the patron of Emilia Lanier, first woman to style herself a professional poet (and possibly Shakespeare’s dark lady). She enjoyed being a mistress more than a wife. I would know more of them. Lady Russell’s daughter Anne is most celebrated in the placards around the castle itself, and planted the lovely old yew that stands in the castle courtyard in 1659. They grow so slowly.

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City Unseen, Country Walks Without a Car, Walking

A hissing of Geese: Rochdale Canal Walk

June 11, 2021 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

Geese everywhere. Big. Mean. Angry. The collective noun is supposed to be a gaggle, in flight it is a skein a team a wedge a plump. None of these terms capture the absolute terror of geese protecting their young on a narrow canal path. Hissing bastards. Look at its tongue, my god:

We got past these but not the next. Four hissing adults square in the middle, a bunch of heedless goslings along the far edge. Maybe if we still had some of our pies left, but no. We beat a retreat. Less than a mile to go around, and we didn’t mind that the older gent and his young grandson we warned about them on our way back got past without a problem (the geese had obviously taken to the water, or they are as afraid of small boys as we are). I got this picture though, probably didn’t mean much to Mark, but it was a win for me. I love these contrasts of Victorian/Edwardian industrial architecture.

Just look at these enormous old mills.

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City Unseen, Country Walks Without a Car, Walking

Rochdale to Healey Dell and the Cotton Famine Road

July 6, 2020 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

We started in Rochdale — I like Rochdale a great deal though austerity feels like a knife here. It has cut so deep, you can see the pain of it. But this was the best walk we’ve done in a long time, up from the tram station to Healey Dell which is an extraordinarily beautiful place.

Of course to get to it, you have to pass a ruined asbestos factory left to sit here empty, enormous, poisonous.

You are warned by signs that this land is still not entirely safe, even where it seems to have returned to the wild.

But then you come to the nature reserve proper, walk along the old railway line and to the beautiful viaduct over the Spodden.

At its base sits Th’Owd Mill I’Thrutch, a fulling mill built in 1676 by the Chadwick family to process woolen cloth until the late 19th Century. Signs tell you:

Originally the cloth was soaked in a concoction of water. stale urine, soapwort, and Fullers Earth. Workers pounded it by foot; just like treading grapes. In 1863 the process became mechanised using steam power, when a boiler house and chimney were built.

There is very little left of it.

You remember once again that this period of industrialisation was not urban. It scattered along rivers like these, a network now of evocative and beautiful ruins along the river banks of the north in places like Lumsdale Valley, Cromford and New Mills. The waterfalls here are splendid things, and the boundaries in this nature preserve are confused between the natural flow of water and that channeled to service the early industrial revolution before the advent of steam. Steam changed everything, lies beneath the short and desperate lives of workers, the terrifying urbanisation of cities like Manchester.

You continue up the Spodden, then walk down a narrow stairway, ears full of water’s crashing to stand looking out upon this and the stones witness to water’s own force for moulding and shaping the world as it passes.

Even here we could not escape Covid-19, the conspiracy theories that swirl around it. COVID-19 PLANNED BY GOVERNMENT written across all the bins…as if we had a government that could plan anything at all.

From here we climbed up to Rooley Moor to meet the Cotton Famine Road. A cobbled road built across the moors by unemployed cotton workers, who sided with the abolitionist cause during the American Civil War. In solidarity with slaves, while also creating employment for themselves, they successfully campaigned for the passage of the 1863 Public Works Act.

I wanted more moors, more space, more air to breathe before going home, but it was getting late and the miles piling up. So instead of following this yellow brick road we headed back down to Healey Dell, back down into Rochdale. Home.

City Unseen, Walking

Ashton-under-Lyne: Portland Basin Museum’s brilliant sign collection (and other things)

February 5, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

Portland Basin Museum is full of quite awesome things, Social History on one floor of the beautiful large warehouse, and Industrial History beneath. A series of rooms shows what life was once like, from the inside of worker’s cottages to shops and chippies and pubs…I love these sorts of things, from the collections of old artifacts to the figures placed there in an attempt to bring scenes to life. I’m not sure that it works, we found the recorded humming of the seamstress and chip shop worker rather terrifying. And yet…

Very cool. My favourite things though, the signs of yesteryear. This on the subject of women and drinking is my very favourite:

But they are all good…

The modern signs are pretty enjoyable as well:

And there is more awesomeness, like the bell rung to summon the Chartists of Hyde to meetings:

We came here to do some shopping, but I’m glad we wandered a bit, stared down streets with the moors rising up beyond them:

Wandered past the canals:

The shop is also full of brilliant local history publications…

[FAG id=8258]

Archaeology, Country Walks Without a Car, Labour, Walking

Caudwell Flour Mill and Mill Stones Left Behind

September 6, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 2 Comments

In every city, town and village we have walked past old mills, now repurposed and turned into luxury flats most of them. It was good to see one still running as a mill, and even better to learn it was open as a museum. It was such a pleasure to walk around a working mill, see the history of past innovations. Had we not been about to embark on a walk of many miles up several large hills, we would have bought some flour…

Some of the exhibits discussed the changing technologies — both the move from the beautiful old water wheels that to my mind still signify a mill to the new water turbines that so much more efficiently powered the machinery, and the use of rollers to grind grain rather than the great circular millstones. Once upon a time mills were a ubiquitous feature of towns, villages and cities — I loved this map that showed just how many there once were in this area along the river systems:

The change in the grinding of grain to bake our bread is just one of the changes that modernity has brought to our lives, a change to both the rhythm of our days and the food that we eat. I wonder if we can even guess now just how great a change that has been.

The machinery inside was wonderful

The Hammer Mill — ‘Miracle Mill’ No. 2, used to pulverize stock into powder:

Measurers and grain elevators:

Flour sifters at all levels of fineness, and their machinery:

This was less the amazing old machinery, and more the title — Baron “Dreadnought” Grinder:

You climb story after story, here is a view of the beautiful country from the top:

An old dust collector at the very top, of exquisite carpentry surrounded by bewildering belts and struts

This area was the birthplace of the industrial revolution, which impacted upon flour mills as much as mills of any other kind — the Caudwell Mill was in the forefront of some of these changes. It was fascinating to continue our walk, get a bit lost per usual, and stumble across further remnants of this past. Not without first passing one of the most lovely farms I’ve seen:

and a chicken crossing a road — though too far away for questions:

We climbed up into the woods

We think we had already gone wrong at this point, but I could not be sorry. Because then we found this:

Something to do with the quarry we think, though perhaps another mill. Up through more forest

More ruins:

To find a fallen stack of old mill stones — victims of technological change left here unwanted and unneeded…

and perhaps this was part of the end of these quarries, now reclaimed by the forest and more beautiful thereby.

This is heading up to Stanton Moor, which was more beautiful still, but more on that later. Better to sit with thoughts of human endeavour, how much everything has changed, what happened to technologies left behind and the men who once excelled in them…

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Country Walks Without a Car, Labour, Walking

Antediluvian Quarries, Peak District

September 1, 2015 Andrea Gibbons 1 Comment

We climbed stone stairs no one had tread regularly for a very long time…

we were off our path but we didn’t yet know it, because we were on someone’s path — though no one in the past few days perhaps. We followed faint traces to climb through heat and humidity, nettles and brambles stinging against our legs. Drawing blood. The valley opened up beneath us and we entered into pine forest — the first we had been in this trip.

A lovely, open pine forest scenting the air and full of light, not the close packed replacement and industrial forests. We had strayed from the way, but it didn’t matter because we found this.

A beautiful, eerie landscape

where stone-built walls and quarried stone faces mingled, all of it swallowed by moss and pine needles and trees so the natural world and the human one were almost indistinguishable.

Great slabs of stone, whether tumbled down or piled up almost impossible to tell, alongside great chimneys of rock.

Ferns of a green I still find hard to imagine, coming from the desert. The green of my dreams as a little girl.

Enormous mossy stones in piles

Sunlight streaming down through the trees, and everywhere a verdant landscape spilling across the distance. And us there, up above it in this place of human effort and labour swallowed up by the forest. This lonely place of memory now, and stillness.

Happy accident that brought us here. We followed this track back down the hill, and then found our way.

Of that more tomorrow…

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