FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

I've been using the map viewer ever since Wendy alerted me to it. Wonderful resource.
That'll be a good lecture Wendy.....



Walt Fisher once told me that his father was a part time guard there in the Great War and he could remember the clouds of orange smoke when they burned the stocks after the war.

[Tizer]

Wendy, I wondered whether you might tell me it was the one you used! I recalled you having put something like that on OG but I couldn't remember it's name. It's certainly very useful.

[Stanley]

I like the fact it's a Scottish site.....
I usually use the side by side option. You can pinpoint a location on the older maps and at the same time see where it is now in the modern townscape. I've just been looking at Hope Memorial School and the same location is now in a green patch embedded in the middle of the motorway junction..... Truly a forgotten corner!

[Stanley]

We are faced with an impending forgotten corner as Majestic Discounts closes its doors as its lease ends in May and the lady who runs it is not renewing. She is running the stock down and may well close before then. Looking ahead one wonders how long it will be before the premises are in use again. On present showing, large shops like that are not at a premium at the moment.
One of the signs of the times is what happens to small retail shops when they go out of business. Dress shops, nail bars and of late an estate agent replace what were traditional butcher's grocer's and food shops. I suppose the rot set in when the advent of the supermarkets killed the corner grocer's shop. I can't do anything about these changes apart from supporting the independent retailers whenever I can but I recognise it's a losing battle.
One thing seems certain, we shall have plenty of fast food and betting shops neither of which can expect my patronage!

[PanBiker]

That's sad, I remember of course when it was Thackerays with wooden and glass counters and floor to ceiling drawers and cupboards. Fortunately we still have Colin at Redmonds, lots of good stuff there.

[Stanley]

One of the shops at the Majestic was used for filming the Alan Bennett film 'Private Function' I think.



I did this pic in 1982. I like these old pics. Notice the condition of the road surface and go and look at it today..... Good tarmac is getting to be a forgotten corner in Barlick.....

[PanBiker]

All of them actually, the entire Majestic block had a makeover for the filming. Gus has just put a series of pictures up over on the Barlick Then and Now facebook site showing the makeover and some shots of the filming.

Barnoldswick and Barlickers Then and Now

There are a few here of the makeover if you uses the scroll bars at the side. There are more of the actual filming with Maggie Smith and Michael Palin put up earlier on the site if you look.

[Stanley]

Thanks for that Ian. I thought it was about then. It's a personal forgotten corner but because John Miller at Pendle Heritage was at Giggleswick School with Alan Bennett and as I very often acted as chauffeur for him when I was there, I met Alan when I took John to visit him at Twistleton Yard in Settle and that was when they were filming Private Function. Alan told me he liked Barlick and was glad some of the filming was being done there in fact I got the impression that he might have had some input into the location choice.
That brings to mind another forgotten corner but associated with Settle. Half way up Buckhaw Brow on the right hand side of the road there was a stone trough set back into the bank. This was famous locally because the flow of the spring into the trough rose and fell and it was called the 'Ebbing and Flowing' well. Unfortunately there were some extensive roadworks and somehow the flow was interrupted and from then on it stopped rising and falling. I have a vague memory that this affected water flow into the valley and there was some connection with a playing field associated with Giggleswick School flooding.
Amazing how memory can be triggered!

[Stanley]

I've often mentioned how one of the biggest forgotten corners in Barlick is anything that is underground. I'm thinking particularly this morning about culverted watercourses, drains and sewers.
When work is being done on these essential assets I am a nosy bugger, I always keep an eye on the excavations. I don't know if you remember but a few years ago there was a problem with a drain or sewer that runs across Church Street at the top end of Butts, it started backing up because a section had collapsed in Butts. They came and dug down to it and did the necessary repairs which were extensive. Now the thing about this is that the manhole on the gable end of what is now the Fountain is at the top of a shaft that is about 12 feet deep! I have racked my brains about it and all I can think is that it is a mains sewer bringing waste down from the South end of the town on its way to the treatment plant at Greenberfield. I often comment on the fact that when this system was being installed in the late 19th century the whole of the town must have been dug up. From the evidence of these repairs, some of the trenches must have been at least twelve feet deep in places. It puts a different scale on the disruption that must have been caused.......

[Tizer]

Sounds a bit like London, especially around the Fleet river where you have to dig down through layer upon layer of human habitation to reach the Roman stuff. Terry Pratchett always made much of this in his descriptions of the Discworld city of Ank-Morpork where you built your houses on top of those of the previous generations!

[Stanley]

One thing I always recognise when I wander through the thickets of history is that the human race is quite good at digging! From the earliest times we were always digging or raising stones. Roman soldiers would build a temporary fort for an overnight halt, I've always said that the Roman armies are best understood if we regard them as well armed civil engineers. The built walls and bridges on an enormous scale. Look at the canals and railways, sinking mines and generally modifying the landscape, all by human and horse power. So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised at twelve feet deep trenches for drains and sewers.
Thinking back I shouldn't be so surprised. When I was on the 17 Pdrs in my army days we used to dig a gun pit by hand almost every time we stopped and were always digging fox holes and trenches. It's amazing how fast you can burrow into the ground for protection!



Here's part of the Black Dyke on Blacko Hill. It's an enormous earth work stretching away across the hill towards Weets Hill and Gisburn. Dug by hand as a tribal boundary it is still part of the limits of the Manor of Barnoldswick. It dates back to the Bronze Age or even earlier so they wouldn't even have the benefit of spades and iron picks.... You have to admire the old ones! [And recognise that what we see today is only a remnant. Over the years it has eroded and fallen in, originally it would be much deeper and might even have had a wooden defensive paling on top.]

[Tizer]

As well as being good at digging, the human race has also been active in piling up whatever it digs out of the ground. have a look at this interesting article in the latest issue of `Current Archaeology' magazine...
`Normal for Normans? Exploring the large round mounds of England' LINK

[Stanley]

They threw Mottes up almost overnight!

[Stanley]

Manchester Road before widening in 1965, 'Garra' Pickles and his dog in the foreground. I know, I've used this pic many times but this morning look at the sharp corner on the lane leading up to Hey Farm at the bottom of the croft. Thinking about our ancestors digging and delving I am reminded that when the road was widened I decided to take a bit off that corner to make it easier for me and my wagons. I dug it out by hand and I was amazed how much soil had to be removed for a small job like that, it all had to be barrowed away up the hill by hand. Don't ever underestimate the amount of hard labour that went into our earthworks!

[Stanley]

A very personal forgotten corner this morning triggered by the above picture.
The small white brick-built structure on the end of the barn was the pigsty. It had a couple of enclosures with drinking bowls and sleeper covered wood floors and we kept the pigs on straw. They had the croft outside during the day and the sty was always open so if the weather was bad they could go and shelter. They were the happiest pigs in the district I think! I kept two breeding sows and we made a return by selling weaners but never really made it pay, they were pets more than anything. I suppose we just about broke even but the real pay back was the entertainment we got from them and the kids loved them.



We used to hire a travelling boar when we needed his services. Here's my father with it in the 1960s. I had a complaint once from a lady across the road who thought that allowing the boar to brim the sows in the Croft in full view was an abomination. Nowt so queer as folk!

[Stanley]

One of the things we discovered at Hey was that keeping animals in a built up area had its drawbacks. We had more mice than you could poke a stick at! Our defence was to maintain a healthy cat population. They lived in the barn and were active all day, you always saw at least one cat hunting. These weren't pets, they were working animals.
At that time I had a Manchester Terrier, Tip, which was given to me because its owner couldn't manage it, it would attack its own shadow! He saw the cats as mortal enemies. I used to keep him in the workshop during the day and when I came home at night let him have a good run and his exercise. His first port of call was always the barn and the cats used to line up on the edge of the baulks where they knew they were out of his reach and safe. Tip used to go berserk and to be honest all I did was laugh at him.
One day, we had a delivery of hay and I told Vera to get him to throw the bales off under cover in the mowstead bottom and my mate Ted and I would throw them up when I came home......

[Stanley]

I always let Tip out for a run when I got home. That day he did his usual thing, shot up into the barn to plague his cats. The difference was that on that day he ran up the bales onto the baulks and started killing cats.... Cats exploded out of the barn in all directions, he killed two and the others buggered off. We were a farm without cats! My dad swore I did it on purpose and didn't speak to me for days. He was wrong of course, it never entered my head but we had a problem, a high mouse count and no feral cats! I put my thinking cap on as Ted and I threw the bales up off the floor.......

[Stanley]

I was working for West Marton Dairies at the time and one of my regular calls to pick milk up was Thornton Hall Farm, at that time run by Ernie Dawson and his sons as a dairy farm. Ernie was a formidable character but we always got on well with each other.



Ernie Dawson.

I told Ernie I wanted some cats and he said no problem, they had lots about! The next question was samming them up but Ernie had the answer. He knew that there were always some in the stable next to the house. The cats were feral and Ernie knew how they behaved so he gave me a sack and a piece of string and told me to hold it over the pipe in the back wall that drained the stable. He said that when he banged on the door the cats would all head for this pipe, it was their escape route. I had decided 5 cats would be about right and when he banged on the door I counted five and then took the sack away but miscounted and when I got him and released them in the barn there were 7! That solved our cat problem, they settled in straight away and had a happy and productive life.
In case you're wondering about Tip.... Shortly after I found he had been in the pens behind the Dog and killed a couple of hens. They belonged to a mate of mine so we sorted that out but I decided enough was enough and got the RSPCA to put him down. Sounds cruel but once a dog gets into a habit like that you can't cure them and that's cruel to the hens!

[Stanley]

Mention of picking up milk reminds me of the forgotten corner of the regular sight of wagons in Barlick carrying kits of milk to Dobson's Dairy at Coates Mill. Williamson's of Embsay had the monopoly there and brought milk in all day from all over West Craven. Add the activities at West Marton Dairy and you get some idea of how much milk we produced and processed round here then. It was a major local resource and has all gone now. All you see is the occasional Wiseman tanker picking up what is left as bulk milk straight from the farm.

[Stanley]

Not sure when this is, perhaps the late 1920s or early 30s but it's a portable boiler erected by Jonny Pickles to drive a steam well-boring plant somewhere around Barlick.
I've posted it because boreholes were common in the district and until the 1970s a firm from Harrogate could be seen regularly around the district putting in water bore holes for outlying farms not on mains water. The need for the wells was I think connected to milk production. More water was needed than the old wells and springs could supply and so the supply had to be improved. The last time I saw them working was at a farm on the way up to Black Lane Ends from Colne in the late 1960s. Wendy can tell us about this as she still relies on a spring!

[Tizer]

How did steam well-boring work? What did it involve, besides the boiler?

[Stanley]

In those days Tiz they were mainly percussive borers, a heavy tube with a cutting edge on the bottom suspended on a wire rope that was raised about 8ft and allowed to drop, the impact cutting into the substrata and forcing it up the tube which, when it was judged full was hauled out and emptied. Different cutting edges used for different strata. The steam engine provided the power to raise the boring tool for each blow and to withdraw it, later superseded by a diesel engine.
There were rotary boring machines but they were usually only used for the deeper and bigger diameter wells.



Here's a 12" rotary core from a well bored around 1900 for the Barlick water supply. It was in very hard millstone grit and was over 600ft deep. Today even the smaller domestic bores are rotary as the technology has been improved and is much faster.

[Tizer]

Thanks for that and the accompanying photo. Like I said of Tripps the other day, you are never boring - except when necessary as in this post!

[Stanley]

I like that..... Thanks.
There was a Kirby Malham born lad living in Barlick at one time who was known from his youth as 'Science' Clark.
He worked for a firm called Power Handling at Steeton who used Halco Huist rock drills and had contracts with quarries all over the North drilling for major blasts. (LINK to their history) When Power Handling went out of business he bought his own Halco drill and took over some of the contracts. The last time I saw him many years ago I asked him how he was and he told me he was dying, he had lung cancer brought on by the rock dust......

[Tizer]

When we used to visit Paddy Howe, the famous fossil man in Lyme Regis, his workshop was in a cellar underneath a shop. He had lots of shelves on the walls with fossils for sale, a desk under the stairs (usually completely covered in papers and fossils) and in the corner a small glazed room about the size of a privy and containing a chair, small table and his tools. All the dusty prep work went on in there and, thankfully, it had a great big extractor fan at the back.