FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

Tiz commented on another topic about council houses with a view. This pic is from the front of my mother's council house on Avon Drive in 1979. It must have been one of the better views in the town. Eastwood Bridge is still there in 1979 and so are the open fields beyond. Things have changed somewhat in the last 37 years.....

[David Whipp]

Stanley's picture reminds me that one of Barlick's forgotten corners is the strip of canalside land alongside the Leeds and Liverpool Canal which is part of the canal company's original ownership.

In the hen pens next to us, there used to be a boundary marker several yards from the canal indicating where the division was. (Don't know if it's still there - couldn't find it a few years ago, but it may be covered in vegetation.)

On Stanley's picture, the boundary is fenced with the concrete posts and chain link fencing. For the most part along that stretch residents have removed the fencing and extended gardens to the canal.

I was looking at Land Registry plans showing registered plots covering part of the canal in Barlick yesterday. Interestingly, the canal's registration mostly follows the old fence line but in some cases households have registered land right to the canal bank, and in other places, there's a narrow strip of unregistered land between registrations.

This should all make for some interesting conveyancing in the future!

[Stanley]

An old problem David! If you read the CHSC minute books at the time when they were considering building a new shed on the Parrock you'll find that they hit many problems with boundaries. The whole of that area is a bit of a mish mash if you look at it, a lot of CHSC land has been encroached on over the years. Harold Duxbury once told me he was still collecting garage rents from the piece near Gillian's Beck but didn't have an address to send the money to! No doubt the passage of time has consolidated titles but we all know what lawyers are like!
Come to think, good examples are the site of the Squatter's Hovel in Walmsgate and the ownership of Poor Bones on Manchester Road...... Was Tubber Hall an encroachment on the Waste?

[David Whipp]

New building on a corner of the land my dad used to rent for hen pens at the top of Applegarth. The timber frame company are lifting one of the final roof sections into place. The new home is to be called 'Bank House'. It's very close to the site of the old Bank House, and the permanent access will use the drive to Bank House off Hawthorn Drive.

The house is a self-build project by a young family currently living in a static caravan next to the site.

In the foreground on the left of the picture you can see part of one of the properties on Brindley Mews, which stands on the site of Coates Mill (Dobson's Dairy, Yorkshire Plush, Hope Mill...).

This is the second social housing scheme built in Barlick recently (to be officially opened on 22nd August). Both it and Scothern Close (opened last year) have been built using funding from the government's Homes and Communities Agency and provide scores of much needed social housing homes in our town.

Unfortunately, the government funding streams have now been changed, with the priority now given to 'starter homes' for first time buyers. Such schemes don't stack up financially in Pendle (due to relatively low property values) and, given the abundance of inexpensive terraced property isn't really what's needed to meet housing need in our borough.

[Tizer]

From the photo it looks like they are building the house from SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels). These are a foam insulation core sandwiched between timber panels. They are made to size in the factory then delivered by lorry and hoisted into place. They give a very well insulated house and good control over air ingress. It's the way I'd like to self-build if I were doing it now, and if the site was away from too much noise. The panels are good heat insulators but poor sound insulators. However you can improve the sound insulation if you build a masonry skin outside the panels. Stopping sound needs dense material.

[Stanley]

"Stopping sound needs dense material." True, like 18" stone walls.....
Nice to see the old Bank House site being re-used. I wonder whether it will be as prominent and have such good views as the old one built by Christopher Bracewell?



Bank House dominating the skyline in 1905.

[David Whipp]

The new house isn't quite on the site of Bank House, though it'll use the old driveway; it's at the top of Applegarth. It does make an impression on the skyline though!

[Stanley]

Bank House deed plan 23 July 1914.

[Stanley]

Here's a comparison with David's pics. Bankfield boiler and engine house as was......

[Stanley]

Burnley Ironworks erecting shop in 1917. There is a connection with Barlick in that the machines on the shop floor are shell-turning lathes. When the scandal of the shell shortage hit in the Great War, small engineering firms all over the country were turned over to producing shells and a key component was the specialised lathes needed to accurately turn the conical projectiles.



Here's one built by Henry Brown's in the shop at Wellhouse Mill.

[Stanley]

I've been doing a bit of digging because many of the pics were lost when the site went down. The lathe I showed above was for 9" shells and was made in 1940 by Johnny Pickles.



Here's a pic from 1942. This is a six inch shell lathe made by B&P. Jim Fort is stood at the back and Johnny Pickles at the cross slide. A forgotten corner. Many people would be surprised to learn that heavy machine tools like this could be designed and built with resources available in Barlick including making heavy castings.

[Stanley]

Ouzledale Foundry prior to 1937. This small furnace was the precursor to the present foundry at Long Ing and was a valuable resource for firms like Brown and Pickles who were the major engineering firm in Barlick before the war. Very large castings had to be obtained from outside the town because the Cupola at Ouzledale had limited capacity but nevertheless it was an important asset.

[Stanley]

An older pic of Ouzledale. Very poor quality but the more I look at this the older I think it is. I always thought that the pole in the foreground is a telegraph pole but I can't see any evidence of the cupola at what was the foundry and I'm beginning to think that the pole is more likely to be for some other purpose. In 1905 a man called Richard Jones rented Ouzledale and installed a furnace. In 1907 he asked the Calf Hall directors to lend him money to install a gas engine to augment the power from the wheel because he was only getting enough power for an eight hundredweight blow. This suggests that rather than melting iron for casting he was using a tilt hammer for forging, so more an enhanced black smithy than a foundry. So it could well be that this pic is around then.
One further bit of evidence, is that I can't see any evidence of the extension on Butts Mill chimney which was added to burn Ingleton coal. That would be put on in the late 1870s but I suspect this is too early and the quality of the pic is fooling me.
I love studying these old images to see what can be teased out.......

[Stanley]

Many years ago I was given a box of old photographs of Barlick to copy and this was one of them. Most of the pics could be dated to around 1890 and the rounded corners from the original prints were still there on some. This has the rounded corners as well and so I think it's somewhere around that time. You can see the brick extension on Butts Mill chimney on this one. I think it must have been taken from Monkroyd.

[Stanley]

One thing that struck me this morning looking at that pic again is the haze of smoke over the town from domestic coal fires. In itself a forgotten corner.
I was told once that most of the old views of industrial towns were done on Sunday to avoid the smog.

[Stanley]

I tripped over this pic this morning and it it reminded me of when I lived at Sough in 1956 and the railway was still running. If I remember rightly there was a slaughter house in the field behind the crossing and Dr Dick lived in a large house near the crossing. He was a great doctor and in those days he responded to every out of hours call. I once badly crushed a nail and was in agony, I rang the surgery at 9PM and to ask for advice, and he was with me in ten minutes, lanced the skin under the nail, blood spurted out and the pain went! I didn't know about the hot needle to do the same thing. You live and learn......

[Stanley]

Forgotten Corners come in all sorts of guises. Vera folding clothes at Hey Farm in 1977. It seems so old fashioned these days but here's a woman who doesn't have to go out to work unless she wants a bit of pin money. If you look at the top left hand corner of the pic you'll see a glimpse of a .410 single barrel bolt action shotgun hung on the beam. It was quite normal in those days to have a gun handy if you had some land.

[Stanley]

I've been meaning to do these pics for a while. Harold Duxbury once told me that the bricks made from the offal of the Bracewell quarry on Salterforth Lane were rubbish and fit only for lining internal walls. This piece of wall illustrates the truth of this because these bricks are almost certainly from that source and have spalled badly under attack by weather, mainly frost. I seem to remember that the Salterforth Stone and Brick Company got the contract for the boundary wall of the waterworks when it was built so there may be other examples there.
There's a series of connections here which is interesting. When the Rev. Milner built a National School on Church Street at a cost of £625 in 1837/38 he had an agenda. When built it was described as 'an occasional preaching room' as well as being a school. By 1841 Milner had raised more funds and built a new national school in Butts [this became the this building, the Pigeon Club] and by October 1842 a tower had been added to the Church Street building and it was consecrated as a 'Chapel of Ease', Milner's original intention. In 1876 the building became redundant when Billycock gave funds to build the Barnoldswick and Coates Unity School in Fountain street and the students from Butts were transferred there. This building was known popularly as 'The Brick School' and was probably built of Salterforth brick and this might be the reason why it is rendered! In 1885 on Bracewell's death it was redundant, the pupils having been moved to the Wesleyan School on Rainhall Road. It became the Liberal Club. Later it was used as a joiner's shop and builder's merchants. The Rover Company used it as a social club from 1940 and in about 1950 Ouzledale foundry bought it and it became the foundry club. It is now an infant school.
The Butts building was the home of the Barnoldswick Mechanic's institute on an upper floor in 1852, they later met in rooms over the Commercial Inn stables in Green Street and in 1879 bought the redundant Wesleyan Chapel and school on Jepp hill, later to become the council offices.
In 1892 the Butts building was being used as a Liberal Club until the new building on Station Road was built. Meanwhile the Catholics were looking for premises in Barlick and in 1883 hired a room in the Butts building for 3/6 a week to use as a chapel. In 1901 they bought the building and used it as a church until 1914 when they moved into a tin tabernacle on the present site in Gisburn Road. The Butts building was rented to the Union Men's Working Club and became the Pigeon club.

[David Whipp]

Thanks Stanley.

In recent years, after the Pigeon Club closed, the building on Butts was bought by Lakhbir Randhawa (of the newsagents) with the intention of having a restaurant there. This didn't come to anything. A couple of years ago, a new business the Barnoldswick Lounge - a sports bar - opened there.

I'm currently involved with trying to get the potholes sorted out along that stretch of road... an 'interesting' exercise!

[Stanley]

Do you mean the stretch of road from Butts towards the entrance into Carlson's? If so you are into some interesting history. Originally there was a public footpath down Carlson's side of the Calf Hall Beck through to Calf Hall Lane but at one point the mill encroached on that and this explains the dog leg down the side of the Clinic into the back street and also into Walmsgate. Apart from the site of the roller skating rink [Now the Clinic] the Conservative Club had a bowling green there as well. I've had a bit of a dig in the CHSC Minute Books for you. {the complete books are on the site and the originals in the PRO at Preston] You might get some clues....

September 22nd 1909
T Dent chair.
A letter was read from the BUDC relating to Butts Ginnel and it was resolved that the letter be laid on the table for a week. [The 1887 Bracewell sale document has a plan of Butts showing a clearly marked public footpath down the side of the mill between the mill and the beck. It starts at the bridge at Parrock Laithe on Calf Hall Lane and runs down to Butts emerging adjacent to the building that was until recently the Pigeon Club.]

September 29th 1909
The secretary was requested to examine the deeds of the Butts property with a view to ascertaining the company's liabilities to repair the ginnel.

October 14th 1909
T Dent chair. Minutes as read.
Res. That accounts be paid: Trustees of Dr Roberts £1000, interest £10-16-4. H Marsden £357-13-4. Burnley Building Society £272-5-0.
The secretary reported on the inspection of the deeds of Butts Mill and especially to the pathway generally known as the Ginnel. His inspection showed that the Ginnel was a diverted footpath and formed part of the company's property and that in his opinion it was repairable by the present company. [My guess is that before the mill was built c.1845 this was a direct continuation of what is now Calf Hall Lane up the side of CH Shed leading down into the town and was diverted when Bracewell bought the land and built Butts Mill.]

October 8th 1913
A letter was read from BUDC asking the company to put in repair the approach to the footbridge at Butts Mill.
Res. That Mr Wood be asked to examine the deeds to ascertain if the company was responsible for making good this public footpath.

October 15th 1913
The deeds of the Butts property were examined re the BUDC request to repair the footbridge. From the plan affixed to the lease it appeared that the road from the National School to the caul [on Calf Hall Road] and over the bridge was not CHSC property but is an accommodation road only. The bridge referred to is the one to the East of CHSC property and was recently repaired by BUDC.

[David Whipp]

Thanks Stanley.

Part of the public right of way you describe alongside the mill is still shown on the definitive map (a section off Calf Hall Road behind the scout hut). It's shown as a cul-de-sac and, as it's behind the work's fence, isn't accessible.

I'm trying a pragmatic approach with various landowners (including the NHS...) to get a decent surface. Fingers crossed!

[Stanley]

When Butts was under the care of the Ministry of Aircraft Production during WW2 I'll bet they took responsibility for it.



Click to enlarge. The 1887 sale plan you referred to. Even though the path was diverted [and we don't know on what grounds or whether it was legal] the piece of road in question has been a public right of way since time immemorial. Doesn't that have any bearing on the matter?



The piece of road in question.....

[PanBiker]

I remember the route being open when I was a lad. As I understand it, if a footpath or right of way ceases to be used (for whatever reason) after a certain amount of time the status can be changed. It works the other way as well in establishing rights of way if used without challenge over a period. There are a number of examples of lost paths locally if you compare old mapping and the current definitive footpaths map.

[Stanley]

If you look at the sale plan of Butts you'll see a dog leg off the Calf Hall beck going into what was the Parrock. This has fascinated me for years and I think it went to a balance pond in the Parrock which held water drawn from Clough dam which was a higher level and enabled water from Gillians to be used at Butts.

[Stanley]

In 1874 the Bracewell estate was sold and this was the engraving reproduced in the sale documents. A noble pile!