BRACEWELL AND BUTTS
In 1845 William Bracewell (‘Billycock’) made what was in those days an enormous investment when he built Butts Mill, the first purpose-built steam cotton mill in Barnoldswick. In the process he radically altered the area. To make room for the mill he had to cut away the hillside at what is now the Taylor Street end of the site and carted all the spoil from there up Calf Hall Lane to an old quarry beyond the present cattle grid where Pickles Hippings joins the lane. From the look of the ground he also landscaped the area between the quarry and the cattle grid and in the process perhaps covered evidence of the short-lived 12th century Cistercian monastery there.
His new mill needed water for the condensers on his engines in order to make them economical to run and the obvious source is Calf Hall beck which comes down off the moor to the west and at that time actually ran through the land he was building on. There was a disused water driven twist mill at what we now know as Parrock Laithe where the scout headquarters are. He must have gained control of the rights to use the beck beyond this point because it looks as though he installed a weir there to divert water under his mill. I’m not certain about this because so much has been changed but if you look into the beck where it emerges from the culvert under the road at Parrock you can see the stonework of a substantial weir in the far bank. This is in exactly the right place to divert the water he needed and I am almost certain that it is associated with the new mill. Harold Duxbury was manager of the Calf Hall Shed Company which owned Butts Mill in the 20th century and he told me that he once went under the mill to inspect the underground lodge that held the water supply for the condensers. Any overflow from the weir into the beck followed roughly the same course we can see today. We should take note here that Butts was notorious in the early days for being short of water. Billycock investigated every avenue to alleviate this problem and one thing he did was build Springs Dam to manage the water flow. In the course of this he diverted water, sometimes illegally, from other springs to augment the supply.
Once the water had been used in the mill it flowed out underground into the middle of the road outside the mill and joined the overflow from the weir at Parrock and Gillian’s Beck which came down behind what was the school. This confluence was in a sump surrounded by a wall which must have looked a bit like a roundabout. From there, the combined flows became Butts Beck and flowed on down the valley. There was no road down Butts, just a footpath and from what we can see on the 1853 OS map, the course of the beck was the same as it is today. The confluence in the sump is no longer visible, at some point it was covered over to get rid of the obstruction. There’s a cast iron manhole in the road slightly nearer the Pigeon Club and if you listen carefully you can hear the water running beneath the road. About two hundred yards down the beck there is another weir just upstream of the footbridge leading into the park. This is an ancient structure first built in the late 16th century (but later improved) as part of the works to supply water to the Corn Mill. We’ll come back to that later.
What I want to try to puzzle out is what Butts was like before all these alterations took place. We know that the land on the south side of the beck from Parrock Laithe down to Butts was a small farm known as The Parrock because we have records of it being owned by the Trustees of the old Baptist Chapel in Wapping. We also know that in 1853 there were no buildings in Butts below the mill. The next farm down the valley was Hen House on Gisburn Road and if you followed the beck Dam Head Farm was the first you came to. What you would have seen in Butts in 1850 was the ancient landscape of the town. However, if you look at the pattern of building around Butts Top it seems as though there was a well-used thoroughfare, important enough to leave its mark on the modern townscape. The question I have in my head is why? There was no through route to anywhere, it wasn’t for access to the lower part of the town because our ancestors weren’t daft, they didn’t go downhill to climb back up again to what is now Commercial Street, they walked on the level. What was so important down Butts?
The most widely-held explanation for the name ‘Butts’ is that it was where archery practice took place. In many towns this is true. However, I don’t think this was the case in Barlick. One thing that was essential to all medieval villages was a common field system. We have evidence of this land use in Bracewell as late as the 18th century. My picture this week is a section of the 1717 Bracewell Estate map which shows strip systems at Haber and Mither Close to the west of Stock village. On Mither Close there are strips called Horton Butts and on Haber there are three small parcels of land called Butts. This field name is not used anywhere else on the map.
There is only one place in Barlick where there is any clue that indicates where our field system was. The name ‘butts’ was most commonly used to describe pieces of land within the strip system. In addition there are records of cottages described as ‘Herriff Butts’, Herriff is the archaic name for a weed called Goose Grass or Cleavers. The individual plots in a strip system had names and you have to ask yourself whether there was one of them infested by the weed, hence the name Herriff Butts. None of this is conclusive proof of course but I think that access to a field system would be more likely to leave a permanent mark on the landscape than an archery ground.
The field system was an important economic asset and was a customary right of the townspeople dating back to at least 600. Even the advent of the monks and their ownership of the manor from the 12th century onwards couldn’t extinguish such a privilege. Butts is the right place for common fields and on balance I think that this is the most likely origin for the name. Next week I’ll have a look at Bracewell and his green field site, Butts wasn’t the limit of his ambitions.
SCG/16 October 2009
One of the medieval field systems at Bracewell.
