I've only been living in Barlick for sixty years so I'm still an 'off-comed un' but I delight in looking back though my picture archive and seeing how things have changed.
This weeks image is the site of the old railway station in 1979 after it had been landscaped but before the Pioneer store was built, the old Central Co-op building in Albert Road was still going strong. The level crossing has gone, what is now The Green has been landscaped and grassed and the only remnant of the old railway line is the original boundary wall down at the far end alongside the fire station and of course the old railway bridge that I'm standing on on Long Ing Lane. The town has gained a car park!
However, what interests me most in this image is something we walk past every day and never give it a second glance. It's the wall from Wellhouse Road to the beginning of the Pioneer Store as it is now. Have you ever looked at it carefully? If you have you'll know that unlike almost every other wall in the town it's built with limestone blocks unlike the rest of the old town which is grit-stone from Tubber Hill.
Round about 1800 when the Leeds and Liverpool canal was being built through the town the traffic that was anticipated was mostly coal and limestone. The Canal Company were smart, they had realised that Lancashire was short of good limestone and that due to the Craven Fault, the East end of Barlick was on limestone. This was the genesis of the existing limestone quarries at Greenberfield and Gill, burned lime was a valuable commodity both for building and spreading on the land. The Canal Company opened an entirely new quarry at what became Rainhall Rock and exported tens of thousands of tons of stone via the Little Cut, a short channel from the main canal at Barnsey right into the quarry. Apart from exporting the stone they used it in all their building works when constructing the canal. Once the canal was completed they let the quarry out to Wasney of Fence End. When it reached the end of its useful life as a quarry BUDC bought it and used it for landfill of the town's rubbish for many years.
My puzzle is, why, when the railway was being built, did they use limestone instead of grit-stone? Billycock Bracewell was one of the main promoters of the new branch line and at the time most of the grit-stone quarries were controlled by the Roundel Estate at Gledstone. My suspicion is that Billycock had some sort of an issue with Roundel and preferred to deal with Wasney. Of course I may be wrong, it may just have been a matter of price but it's one of those niggling little puzzles that I chew on when I'm looking at our history. Whatever the reason, it's the biggest use of limestone in the town as a building material.
The old railway yard in 1979.
