WATERY MATTERS
I'm writing this just before the Old Year dies. Jack and I have just come back from our early morning walk round the town in what I call stair-rod rain, funnily enough as soon as we got back it eased off but that's par for the course. I am lucky in that Jack doesn't mind the rain and I have a full set of wet weather gear. Our route takes us through Valley Gardens and up Butts and as soon as I turned into the gardens off Gisburn Road I heard Butts Beck roaring under the bridge. We got to the weir behind Briggs and Duxbury's and it's forty years since I saw as much water in the beck. It was coming over the cill brown and at least a foot deep. It must have rained a lot during the night and of course the moor will be sodden, it can't take any more water so anything that falls runs straight down into the town. Luckily the Council have been doing a good job and the culverts are open and dealing with the flood, we don't want a repetition of 1932!
You know me by now and it won't surprise you that my mind was working in watery mode. The first thought that came to me was that a lot of people could be surprised to learn that this amount of water was bad news for the old watermills in the town. Apart from the danger of excess water damaging the watercourses and weirs, this amount of water raises the level of the main stream into which the tail water from the wheel emptied. This could reach a level where it backed up to the wheel and submerged the lower part of it drastically reducing efficiency. The old millers used to call this 'wallowing' and it could easily rob them of three quarters of the usual power. So, too much water was as bad as too little.
Thinking back even further, and in Barlick we can go back at least 2,000 years, rain this heavy was bad news for our ancestors. Apart from the fact that they had no wet weather gear, in those days not much drainage had been done. They relied on natural protection like building their houses on ground that couldn't flood. The settlement at Townhead and the bottom of Esp Lane is a good example. If you look at the lay of the land, they built on the lower end of a ridge that comes down off the moor. This ridge split the watercourses with Gillians Beck coming down the south side and Calf Hall Beck to the north so apart from ordinary surface drainage they were in no danger of flood. This still applies today of course and it must be a comfort to the owners when they pay their house insurance. Contrast this with the number of modern houses built on flood plains and the problems we have seen them having over the last couple of years. Another great advantage we also have is that Barlick lies on the watershed between the Ribble and Aire river systems so we don't have the problem of dealing with another area's water finding its way down our becks. They only have to cope with the rain falling on the easterly side of Whitemoor.
However, still thinking back 2,000 years, none of the valley bottoms had been drained and they were all very marshy. This is why the oldest routes in the town all follow the high ground unless they are forced to go through a valley. Salterforth must have been a bad crossing in wet weather on the line taken by the old salt road from Earby up to Lanehead, remember, this was before there was a bridge there. The first improvement was stepping stones and the only ones I am sure of were at the crossing of Calf Hall Beck on what the old folk still call Shitten Ginnel between Townhead and Calf Hall Lane. The old name for these stones was 'Hippings' and this is why many call the path 'Pickles Hippings' though in truth this only applies to the crossing of the beck. It's marked as such on the First Edition of the 6” Ordnance Survey map of 1853, there is a bridge there now. I have an idea there may have been stepping stones in Walmsgate where the road crosses Gillians Beck but these were lost when the road was improved in the early 19th century when the beck was culverted and the road raised. If you look into the yards of the houses on the south corner of Walmsgate, at what used to be called Lamb Hill, you can see the original road level. The pull out of Walmsgate onto the level of Barnoldswick Lane (now Manchester Road) would have been very steep and I think that originally the old road followed the line of the ginnel on the north side behind the Squatter's Hut and directly into what we now call Philip Street but was originally Back Lane and the major route into the town.
Even though the routes they used were on higher ground, our ancestors still had a problem when there was a lot of water about. With constant use the paths wore away into gullies and became minor water courses in their own right. Anyone who can remember what heavy rain used to do to Lister Well Lane at Tubber Hill will know that heavy rain could rip the road out down to the bedrock. Over the last thirty years the users have taken a lot of trouble to pave and drain the road so they don't have this problem now. It was this wearing down of the road surface and the damage caused by early traffic that made our roads so bad and triggered the Turnpike Trusts in the 17th century. There is a famous story about Blind Jack of Knaresborough, a famous early road builder, being offered a lift by a nobleman in his carriage but refusing on the grounds that he was in a hurry. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds because potholes could be four feet deep.
Thanks to the forethought of our ancestors and later improvements in surfacing and drainage we don't have these problems today. I often think of how bad it must have been for ladies in the town up to about 1900 when wet weather turned the streets into a mud bath. Next time you cross Church Street just imagine you have skirts trailing the ground and four inches of liquid mud to negotiate! Look on the bright side, we have wet weather but we also have modern waterproof clothes and well drained streets free of mud. Things could be a lot worse!
The damage done to Lister Well Lane in the 1932 flood.
