OneGuyFromBarlick

Lovely Stanley.

An American Big Boy locomotive. The biggest ever built. (LINK)

We should not forget the role of the gas engine. This large Nuremberg Gas Engine ran an alternator at the Bargoed Power Station for the Powell Duffryn Steam Coal Company in South Wales.

We have got so used to using electric motors for motive power that we forget what it was like before mains electricity. When I was working on Harrod's Farm near Whatcote in Warwickshire in 253/54 we had our own Lister diesel generator, hand started, no automatic gear, and ran barn machinery and the milking machines with small electric motors. Many large farms, particularly in Scotland had their own boilers and steam engines and drove machinery by shafting and belting. At Bancroft Shed, the original lighting was 110v DC and there were glass batteries in the cellar which were charged during the day and at night supplied the Nutters houses with 24 volts DC for lighting only. The alternator was installed to replace the old dynamo after WW2. Ellenroad had a similar system until closure, the Browett and Lindley pilot engine drove a 110v dynamo to power the pilot lights in the mill until the main engine started when the alternator took over and provided 440v Three Phase AC for the electric motors.

Steam engines come in all sorts of sizes. Newton Pickles' shed in the garage on Vicarage Road. He had the large loco on the go for years and eventually finished it. This was in 1988. And if you think you recognise the small lathe on the left under the window you're right, it's the copy of the Birch lathe that Johnny made in 1927 and it's in my front room now....

The weir that served the original mill at Saltaire. 1979.

Steam engines didn't always have lodges. Here's the weir on the River Beal at Ellenroad that ensured the jack wells for the condenser cooling water were always full.

The weir on the River Derwent at Matlock Bath which serves Masson Mill. The water is still used to drive a large turbine which supplies electricity for the mill and puts the surplus into the National Grid. It also supplied the boiler feed water and the condenser cooling water for the steam engine.

The Passaic river falls at Paterson, New Jersey, in 1981. Masson and Saltaire are big water resources but pale into insignificance compared to the great North American water sites. At Paterson a head race along the top of the cliff supplied all the mills in the town, almost unlimited power and the reason why Paterson had so many industries powered by water.

Headrace sluice at Paterson in 1981. Plenty of water for the mills in the town!

Higherford mill water resource in 1906.

Corn Mill clow in 1982. Sadly neglected but the sluice was still intact.

I wonder if these pictures are from when me and Mike Warner waded in the ooze clearing out the junk dumped in the beck? Certainly 1980s...

This is the mill race in Valley Gardens, pictured this afternoon.

They were in 1982. What a good job someone noticed.....

The old bridge over Calf Hall Beck at Pickles Hippings in 1982, it has fallen since. However the object of interest is the insignificant little beck. Who would have thought that this trickle could support a water mill at Parrock and subsequently two large steam driven mills, Calf Hall Shed and Butts Mill?

Click to enlarge. The 1892 OS map is not very good on watercourses. Some are badly marked and some missing completely even when they are above ground. On this map, Calf Hall Beck is coming in from the west, flowing down the side of Butts Mill and diving underneath it half way down the Southern side, re-emerging in the roadway on the east of the mill where it is joined by Gillians Beck which has travelled from the culvert at Wapping northwards along the side of what was then the Liberal Club (pigeon club), diving into a short culvert and then reappearing shortly before it joins the Calf Hall Beck in the roadway to become Butts Beck. Completely missing is a balance pond in the Parrock fed from Clough Dam, most likely by a cast iron pipe through the Clough culvert. This balance pond was at a higher level then the Calf Hall Beck and enabled Butts Mill to use the water. The course down the side of the Liberal Club was at too low a level to be of any use. I have slim but credible evidence form Butts Mill records for this water resource and I'm certain it existed. What a pity the watercourses weren't as important to the surveyors as they were to the mill owners! They probably never realised the source or importance of the balance pond.

When work was carried out putting flags down on the path through Ousel Dale next to what is now Clough Park, there was some evidence on the ground to suggest there being a wheel to the west of Clough Mill, with the race - head and or tail(?) - more or less on the line of the present flagged path. Is there any documentary evidence to support this?

By the by, there's a section of the flagged path which does a Duke of York; going up and down a bit. This is a bund to help prevent flood water diverting down the path and onto Walmsgate in the event of a minor inundation.

If you study the map you'll see a short length of open tail race from what must have been the wheel chamber to the start of the culvert.



When CHSC bought Butts they were surprised to find they had also bought Ouzledale water mill. Bracewell had bought it at some time with an eye to the water resource of the saw mill dam but subsequently found that Clough had the riparian rights stitched up. However, this would mean he had a right of way from Wapping up to Forty Steps, probably the origin of the path.

Plan of part of Butts from the sale of 1887. The dark feature is Calf Hall Beck and the plan shows clearly where it dived under the mill. Note the junction just upstream of this, it shows a watercourse coming in from the Parrock and I believe this can only have been from a balance pond. The round feature in the mill back yard is the gas-holder for the mill's private gas plant. Note also the original route of the footpath down the side of the mill.

That footpath route was still in use when I was a youngster. Would need to check, but I don't think it has ever been formally diverted as far as the paperwork goes. On the ground, of course, the path used is now between the clinic and Carlson's land.

Going back to your previous post Stanley, the history of the path through Ouseldale to Forty Steps is much more recent...

In the 1980s, when Silentnight were offering the site of Clough Mill to the council after it had been demolished, me and first wife, Cllr Val Whipp, together with young daughter Emma, went on a recce on a Sunday afternoon to see what could be made of the land.

Coming up from Walmsgate, we navigated the swampy bottom of the dale and forced our way through the undergrowth, finding our way blocked by a fence right across the dale.

It was when we were scrambling over the fence that disaster struck; healing amnesia has erased the memory of exactly how many times, but the wasps from the nest we'd disturbed stung the three of us repeatedly. Val ran off screaming in one direction whilst I scooped up Emma, who was screaming louder than her mum, and legged it in the other direction.

We didn't make it to Forty Steps that day, but eventually the route that people use today was forged. The work being done by the Pendle Re-employment Project gang that dug out the culvert.

The triangle of land that goes up to Forty Steps is part of the Clough Mill title (have been sent a copy of the Land Registry entry now), so it wouldn't have been part of the Ousel Dale mill parcel.

Again, if you go back into the CHSC minute books you'll find that they bought the Parrock off the Trustees of the Baptist church with the ultimate intention of building another weaving shed there. All the discussions and calculations are there and in the end it wasn't viable. For many years the CHSC managed the land and it was used for a variety of purposes including horse shows. In the end land was sold for the roller skating rink and housing with some parts being retained. These eventually devolved to Carlsons when they bought the mill, all this is in the minute books as well.

David, I overlooked your mention of the path up the side of the Clough dam. Quite possible that Bracewell never established a right of way up to the old saw mill as he soon found out that the Mitchells and later the Slaters at Clough mill had the land and the riparian ownership sewn up tight. When Nutters built Bancroft Shed it was only possible because a link by marriage with the Slaters enabled agreement to be reached about the use of Gillians Beck for the New Mill. Even then they had to agree that in times of low water Clough could demand that the beck be by-passed round the dam. The by-pass and sluice arrangement was still in place when I was engineer there. Riparian rights were serious matters!

Stanley wrote:Riparian rights were serious matters!

...and still are when it comes to flooding issues.

But most folk are blissfully unaware of them, together with their riparian responsibilities.