STANLEY’S THOUGHTS ON FORTY STEPS.

[Stanley]

STANLEY’S THOUGHTS ON FORTY STEPS.

Many years ago, in the days when my beard was black, I was sat having dinner with Lord Briggs at Gawthorpe Hall and in the course of conversation he said to me that the biggest disservice we do to our children is to knock the facility for being curious and observing their world out of them by the time they reach fourteen. I suspect that the present-day diet of screen fodder has lowered this age considerably. His point was that, in general, people look but they don’t analyse and question what they see.
This is particularly true of local history, Barlick and the area round it is stuffed with visual clues but we are usually so engrossed in pursuing our daily lives that we haven’t got time to read them. This becomes a habit that makes our lives poorer, if you want to really enjoy your history bear this thought in mind, observe and ask questions.
Longfield Lane and Forty Steps is a good place to test yourselves. You need a few tools first, you need to be able to put a rough date on what you see around you, this will come with practice. We haven’t space here to do a full analysis of the buildings in the area but please take it from me that if you were standing at the top of Crow Row in the mid 17th century you would get a bit of a shock. The Hey was there and possibly another building where the houses on the low side of the Dog are now, there is a ruin marked on the 1850 map at this point. Further up the hill, just out of sight would be Old Hall at the top of Barnoldswick Lane but looking out towards Bancroft, there would be nothing but open fields with Gillians Beck flowing down the hill and disappearing down Ouzledale Clough. (Ouzel is an old name for a blackbird).
We’ve got a bit of a problem here because Longfield Lane and Forty Steps bear all the hallmarks of a medieval track. It’s sunk into the ground, there is the right mix of hedgerow trees and it definitely has a purpose, it runs through the valley towards Weets as straight as a shot. What’s the point of a pathway leading nowhere? In those days people had better things to do than walk aimlessly out towards the waste.
This puzzled me for years and even more so when I was engineer at Bancroft. I used to look through the engine house window and wonder why Forty Steps was there, if you asked anyone they said it was worn by workers coming to the mill at Gillians but this wasn’t built until the end of the 18th century at the earliest. I got a clue when I looked at the 1914 6" OS map of the area and saw that the field behind the mill was named Causeway Carr. (The 1914 map is good for this, it has more information than the latest series) Once again, a puzzle, why name a field as though there was a track running through it. I progressed a bit further when I walked up Folly Lane one day and stopped at the top of the second sharp bend above Folly Cottages and looked back down the field. There seemed to be a raised section in line with the higher road behind me and Forty Steps in the distance.
Walking up the hill I climbed the stile just above Standridge House and followed the path up on to the Weets. For most of the way you can distinguish a raised track which seems to have been roughly paved and it goes right up the moor and passes to the south of the actual summit. When I got home I laid a ruler on the map and found that this line down from Weets and along Forty Steps roughly follows Park Avenue which used to be called Blue Pot Lane. This is another lane that doesn’t have any obvious purpose. If you look at the 1851 First Edition OS map, there are no buildings on it and it heads out into open country until it suddenly makes its mind up to turn down to Barlick on what is now Park Road. Looking further along the direct route on the map, Long Ing Lane is on the line and heads out to Gill Church.
All very interesting but so what? For fifteen years these thoughts sat at the back of my mind, I had other fish to fry, there was a family that needed providing for and times were hard. Then, one day, I was talking to the County Archaeologist and he mentioned a Bronze Age enclosure over on Middop. I went out to have a look at it and was stunned by its size. I talked to the archaeologist again and he said that in the absence of any direct evidence from digging, he was convinced that it was an important site which supported itself by trade and a bit of rape and pillage in the Ribble Valley. He told me that one of the major commodities that would have moved through the area was gold from Ireland which was traded with the Baltic States. I was amazed when he said this, I had always imagined that trade was a local affair in those days because of the difficulty of travel but he said that the more he learned, the more he became convinced that trade was far more widespread than we imagined. In the last couple of weeks evidence has emerged in Denmark which seems to indicate that the Danes were trading with China over a thousand years ago so I tend to believe what he said.
All this got me thinking and I went back to my maps and projected my line a bit further afield. At the Weets end, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to connect the line with the Bronze Age hill fort. At the other end I realised that the line was striking out towards Kildwick. The significance of this is that Kildwick is the most northerly low level crossing of the Pennines. This is the reason for the presence of the monks there and the age of the bridge. Things were beginning to fall into place! It was beginning to look a fair bet that what I was looking at on the ground in Barlick was far older than I had thought. If it was a Bronze Age track, what we are looking at on Forty Steps is the Bronze Age equivalent of the M62 and is at least 3,500 years old.
We now come to the difficult and expensive bit. I have no hard evidence for any of the above beyond observation and conjecture. I can’t put my hand on my heart and swear that this is the bronze-age M62, history is like that. It will take a lot of dirt archaeology to prove the case one way or the other. However, there is another way of looking at it. Bronze Age artefacts have been found in Barlick near Gill Church. If the hypothesis is wrong, there are a lot of coincidences cropping up, too many in my estimation, what other explanation is there?
I’m not in the business of looking at history in order to prove that I’m right. At heart I’m a romantic and it suits me to cling to my theory until someone comprehensively demolishes it. There is something there on the ground and it allows me to imagine a solitary procession of pack animals and exhausted travellers slowly moving down from the Weets, along Forty Steps and up Park Avenue perhaps 4,000 years ago.
Looking further into the puzzle, what was significant about the site of what is now Gill Church? If I’m right, this was a focal point long before Christianity was brought to this country. Could this have something to do with another knotty problem which has never been thoroughly investigated as far as I know, why Barlick’s parish church was built outside the town? History tells us that the founders of Christianity knew the benefits of appropriating Pagan customs and sites in order to establish their religion. Suppose this was what they did at Gill? I’m afraid I don’t buy the theory that the Cistercians built it there in a fit of pique to get their own back on Barlickers before they left for Kirkstall!
Right, enough, I think you’ve got enough to work on now. Get the maps out and study them. Go for a walk on Weets and come to your own conclusions. I’ll be delighted if someone comes up with a definitive answer that proves me wrong because I suspect it will be even more interesting than my theory. I’m not claiming that I’m right, just that I’m insatiably curious and a romantic at heart. Nowt wrong with that! Best of luck.

[PanBiker]

A bit more evidence in that, I think it was 1984, a bronze age axe head was found by a metal detectorist at Causeway Carr. It's kept in the Craven Museum in Skipton and has some nice scroll work decoration at the shaft end of the head.

[Stanley]

Thanks for the reminder Ian, I'd forgotten that.