THE DROVERS
Place names give us valuable clues when we're looking at history. Pub names do the same. If you look at what was the Railway at the end of Church Street and trace its history you'll find it was originally known as 'The Scotch Laddie', then 'The Town End'. With the advent of steam engines it became 'The Engine' and when the railway came changed to its last name, 'The Railway'. A potted history of the town in one building, but you might wonder why the Scotch Laddie.
Before the railways, in the absence of a through route by canal, many heavy goods couldn't be moved easily, that's why blue Welsh Slate didn't arrive in Barlick until we had a railway. It may be a surprise to many to realise that the heaviest weight that needed to be moved around was the livestock needed to support the growing population long before either the canals and the railway. The canals were never used for this. However, livestock had one great advantage over other heavy goods, they were self-propelled! You could walk cattle from the great stock-rearing areas in the North to the towns and cities in the South. The men who did this job were the Drovers and at the end of my driving career I was a modern drover doing the same job, taking young stock North and bringing mature cattle South. This triggered my interest in the Drovers and the routes they travelled which criss-crossed the whole of the British Isles.
One great route was down what was then The Great North Road, now the M1 of course, down the East side of England to London and the South. There was also a branch which headed for the Aire Gap at Kildwick and forward into the growing towns of Lancashire. That's how we got the Scotch Laddie and up on the moor near Colne, The Herders. I don't know the exact route through Barlick but it would be from Skipton and I came across another little fact that reinforced my contention that the drovers came through Barlick.
Can any of you remember the small group of houses that stood in the triangle opposite Bancroft's Farm on Colne Road? It was always known as Windy Harbour and I found that there were more locations called this. They were always on a drove or packhorse route and were overnight halts for the drovers and the drivers of the pack horse trains. Can you imagine in your mind's eye a herd of 50 to perhaps 200 cattle walking slowly through the town on their way down to Lancashire? Nobody who is alive today has seen it and it puzzled me for a long time why there was no specific mention in any of the texts I read but then I realised that it was such a common sight, and part of life in those days that it was unremarkable and not worth a mention. Some important facts are hidden so well we have to puzzle them out!
Bancrofts and Windy Harbour in 1950.
