ONE MAN’S VIEW OF LOOKING FOR HISTORY
Posted: 23 Jan 2026, 02:39
ONE MAN’S VIEW OF LOOKING FOR HISTORY
I’m still in America as I write this and have come across a problem with the students I am teaching. It struck me that we have the same problem in Barlick and my antidote for it has a lot to do with the way I look at history so it might be a good thing if I let off a bit of steam and give my readers a better idea of how I work.
The problem I have come across is that people in general, and young people in particular, are being disabled by our TV and computer screen based information systems. I’m sure that many of you have recognised the fact that when we are watching the news the images are fired at us so quickly that we have no time to select from them or edit them, we only have time to accept the image and the idea which some picture editor somewhere has decided is good for us. This is of course a form of censorship or manipulation and I strongly object to it.
This state of affairs is bad enough but the consequences for the young are frightening. I am 64 now and have had enough practice reading newspapers and books and looking at pictures and the landscape to make me fairly fireproof as far as TV manipulation is concerned. It is a different matter with young people, talk to anyone who teaches and they will tell you that one of the most obvious differences between the generation of children they are teaching now and the previous ones is the fact that they can’t concentrate for any length of time and don’t seem to be able to stick to a task. I think that this is a direct result of being fed a mush of pre-digested ideas in rapid succession every time they look at a screen and therefore losing the ability to observe and edit because of lack of practice.
The main reason I am getting concerned about this is that the loss of the ability to observe and take in information cripples the kids as far as my sort of history is concerned. As I think you may have noticed, one of my favourite approaches to learning about the place I live is to do a bit of light research, make sure I know the questions I want answers to and go out on the ground and have a look at the clues, it’s marvellous how a piece of ground or a machine can talk to you if you give it a chance. In order to give it this chance you have to develop the facility of not just ‘looking’ but observing and noting everything you see, this needs patience and concentration and these are exactly the skills that multiple screen images destroy. The Whitemoor map we looked at a few weeks ago was a good example. I had to spend a lot of time concentrating on the map and giving it the chance to tell me what it knew. Once I had this information I went out on the moor to look at the things I had found, when I did that the landscape started talking to me and I found out things I never knew before. This is a magic process and so satisfying, I think I’ll give you another example and perhaps persuade you to go for a walk in the fields.
Bracewell village is an interesting place. The original Hall was the seat of the Tempests who at one time held the Lordship of Barnoldswick, the same Tempests who fought the case of Whitemoor. At some point we’ll come back here and have a much closer look at the village but at the moment my concern is with the land on the opposite side of the road from the church. If you look closely to the left of the institute car park you will see what at first glance looks like a very wide hedge and boundary ditch. If you go into the field and follow the public footpath down the side of the hedge and really look and observe the ‘ditch’ you’ll realise that the ditch is in fact a road. It’s completely overgrown at the top but the further you go down the more obvious it becomes. At the bottom of the field the road goes straight forward through the fence and you have to cross a stile and walk through a strange little section of land. We know from our observation as we walked down the field that this is in fact a roadway but if we hadn’t known this, a funny little croft between two hedges should give us a clue that there is more to this than meets the eye. This is what I mean by letting the land talk to you.
There’s one more thing to take note of here before you go forwards, just as you cross the style you’ll see a small ditch to the left with running water in it. If you look closely on the opposite side of the old road you’ll see there is a dry ditch coming in from the right and passing under the road. Again, this is a very significant clue but we’ll leave what this is telling us until later.
Following the course of the old road we come to the Stock Beck and cross this by a modern footbridge. Pause on the bridge and look down into the beck, what can you see? It takes a minute or two, especially if the beck is in spate and is muddy but if you look hard you’ll see that the bed of the beck is paved with stone setts. We’ve followed the road and so we know what this is, a ford which carried the road from Bracewell across the Stock Beck. I’ll bet you’ve guessed what the next question is! Where on earth is this well made and paved road going to? If you look up the hill you will see the line of the road curving away to the left to ease the slope for horse drawn vehicles but heading towards the crest of the hill. Look to the right of this track and you’ll see a large scar in the hillside. Ask yourself where the stone for Bracewell church and hall came from and then recognise that it was possibly this quarry that is now greened over.
Follow the green road to the top of the hill, round the sharp right hand bend and across to the wall where it goes through into a strange looking field that doesn’t seem to have any boundaries but has three sets of buildings on it. Lean on the wall and look very carefully at this lot, there are lots of clues. Can you see the rectangular platforms dotted about in the field? These are the foundations of houses. What you are looking at is the remains of the lost village of Stock. In the 1851 census there are two shopkeepers mentioned for Stock and numerous cottages. In the next fifty years the village vanished except for the buildings you see now. The next question is why and the answer to that is found, not on the site but by understanding what was going on in Barlick at the time.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the first dedicated steam mill had been started in Barlick and there was an increasing demand for workers. The town started to suck population in from the surrounding villages because people were attracted by the wages and regular work especially for children, they could become wage-earners. At first they would walk to the town each day but gradually, as more houses were built in the town it became easier to rent a house near to where they worked and Stock gradually became depopulated. As the houses became empty they would be quarried for the stone and timber in them until they vanished completely. Once the village had gone, the road fell into disuse and so it has remained to this day. A similar story can be found at Wycollar but in that case the buildings survived and are now re-occupied.
So, we’ve had a nice little walk and amused ourselves along the way. Next time you have visitors or some children to amuse, take them down to Bracewell and set the puzzle to them and see if their powers of observation are up to the task. Before we go home though, there is the small matter of the strange arrangement of watercourses in the little section of the old road near the beck. I’m not going to suggest that you start tramping all over the fields and climbing fences to follow this one up. Use your heads when I’ve told you what you are looking at and ask permission at Yarlside to go into their land.
What we are looking at is a water power resource. Three hundred yards towards Barlick from the ford there are the remains of a dam across the beck and the dry ditch you saw to the right of the road is a leat or head race drawing water off the reservoir behind the dam and carrying it forward to a mill. The question that faced me when I first looked into this was where the mill was. I found it on the ground before I found a map that showed me where it used to be. If you look at the 1851 OS map for Barlick in the library you’ll find that the mill is way down towards the Coronation Hotel, in the fields to the east of Yarlside. [OS reference SD 862494]
If you get permission and go to the site you’ll find you can identify a small lodge, a place where the mill wheel would be (the remains will still be there under the ground) and best of all if you look carefully, a millstone lies in the ground with just a corner showing. Lift the sod to check that you have found it but replace it so that others can have some fun setting the puzzle for their kids or friends. You can see where the tail race went back to the beck and there is one more clue here that is worth noting. Look at the wall down to the beck very carefully, it is almost certainly made of stone robbed out of the mill and a lot of the stones are red as though they have been burned at some time. There are also some 17th century bricks, you can tell them by the fact they are thinner than a modern brick. Bricks of that age are very unusual in this area. Look at the map again and you’ll see there is a field near the church marked as ‘Kiln Field’, this might have been where these bricks were made. In those days they were never carried far, they were too heavy. I think the burnt stones might be a clue as to what happened to the mill. Corn mills were very prone to fire and this might have been the fate of Bracewell Mill.
Before you leave the mill site, sit on the banking for a while and try to imagine what it would be like when the mill was working. There would be a track going away towards the road at Yarlside but apart from that the mill was totally isolated. The only sounds would be the splashing of the water on the wheel, the rumbling of the stones and the gearing and the sound of birds singing. I’ve often thought that being the miller wasn’t a bad job and whilst there was hard work to be done, you can imagine some quiet moments during a hot summer’s day when a pipe of tobacco and a sit on the grass outside the mill must have been very pleasant.
Right, there you have two puzzles and a nice little country walk. Remember what I was saying at the start of this piece, something like this is a good antidote to screen images and well worth taking children to see, they will get some exercise as well! However, remember that in order to understand what you are seeing you need to look hard and ask questions about what you have observed. It isn’t easy at first but the more you do it the better you become. It is a wonderful skill to cultivate and I am forced to wonder how the producers of the screen images would fare. I suspect very badly.
9th May 2000
I’m still in America as I write this and have come across a problem with the students I am teaching. It struck me that we have the same problem in Barlick and my antidote for it has a lot to do with the way I look at history so it might be a good thing if I let off a bit of steam and give my readers a better idea of how I work.
The problem I have come across is that people in general, and young people in particular, are being disabled by our TV and computer screen based information systems. I’m sure that many of you have recognised the fact that when we are watching the news the images are fired at us so quickly that we have no time to select from them or edit them, we only have time to accept the image and the idea which some picture editor somewhere has decided is good for us. This is of course a form of censorship or manipulation and I strongly object to it.
This state of affairs is bad enough but the consequences for the young are frightening. I am 64 now and have had enough practice reading newspapers and books and looking at pictures and the landscape to make me fairly fireproof as far as TV manipulation is concerned. It is a different matter with young people, talk to anyone who teaches and they will tell you that one of the most obvious differences between the generation of children they are teaching now and the previous ones is the fact that they can’t concentrate for any length of time and don’t seem to be able to stick to a task. I think that this is a direct result of being fed a mush of pre-digested ideas in rapid succession every time they look at a screen and therefore losing the ability to observe and edit because of lack of practice.
The main reason I am getting concerned about this is that the loss of the ability to observe and take in information cripples the kids as far as my sort of history is concerned. As I think you may have noticed, one of my favourite approaches to learning about the place I live is to do a bit of light research, make sure I know the questions I want answers to and go out on the ground and have a look at the clues, it’s marvellous how a piece of ground or a machine can talk to you if you give it a chance. In order to give it this chance you have to develop the facility of not just ‘looking’ but observing and noting everything you see, this needs patience and concentration and these are exactly the skills that multiple screen images destroy. The Whitemoor map we looked at a few weeks ago was a good example. I had to spend a lot of time concentrating on the map and giving it the chance to tell me what it knew. Once I had this information I went out on the moor to look at the things I had found, when I did that the landscape started talking to me and I found out things I never knew before. This is a magic process and so satisfying, I think I’ll give you another example and perhaps persuade you to go for a walk in the fields.
Bracewell village is an interesting place. The original Hall was the seat of the Tempests who at one time held the Lordship of Barnoldswick, the same Tempests who fought the case of Whitemoor. At some point we’ll come back here and have a much closer look at the village but at the moment my concern is with the land on the opposite side of the road from the church. If you look closely to the left of the institute car park you will see what at first glance looks like a very wide hedge and boundary ditch. If you go into the field and follow the public footpath down the side of the hedge and really look and observe the ‘ditch’ you’ll realise that the ditch is in fact a road. It’s completely overgrown at the top but the further you go down the more obvious it becomes. At the bottom of the field the road goes straight forward through the fence and you have to cross a stile and walk through a strange little section of land. We know from our observation as we walked down the field that this is in fact a roadway but if we hadn’t known this, a funny little croft between two hedges should give us a clue that there is more to this than meets the eye. This is what I mean by letting the land talk to you.
There’s one more thing to take note of here before you go forwards, just as you cross the style you’ll see a small ditch to the left with running water in it. If you look closely on the opposite side of the old road you’ll see there is a dry ditch coming in from the right and passing under the road. Again, this is a very significant clue but we’ll leave what this is telling us until later.
Following the course of the old road we come to the Stock Beck and cross this by a modern footbridge. Pause on the bridge and look down into the beck, what can you see? It takes a minute or two, especially if the beck is in spate and is muddy but if you look hard you’ll see that the bed of the beck is paved with stone setts. We’ve followed the road and so we know what this is, a ford which carried the road from Bracewell across the Stock Beck. I’ll bet you’ve guessed what the next question is! Where on earth is this well made and paved road going to? If you look up the hill you will see the line of the road curving away to the left to ease the slope for horse drawn vehicles but heading towards the crest of the hill. Look to the right of this track and you’ll see a large scar in the hillside. Ask yourself where the stone for Bracewell church and hall came from and then recognise that it was possibly this quarry that is now greened over.
Follow the green road to the top of the hill, round the sharp right hand bend and across to the wall where it goes through into a strange looking field that doesn’t seem to have any boundaries but has three sets of buildings on it. Lean on the wall and look very carefully at this lot, there are lots of clues. Can you see the rectangular platforms dotted about in the field? These are the foundations of houses. What you are looking at is the remains of the lost village of Stock. In the 1851 census there are two shopkeepers mentioned for Stock and numerous cottages. In the next fifty years the village vanished except for the buildings you see now. The next question is why and the answer to that is found, not on the site but by understanding what was going on in Barlick at the time.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the first dedicated steam mill had been started in Barlick and there was an increasing demand for workers. The town started to suck population in from the surrounding villages because people were attracted by the wages and regular work especially for children, they could become wage-earners. At first they would walk to the town each day but gradually, as more houses were built in the town it became easier to rent a house near to where they worked and Stock gradually became depopulated. As the houses became empty they would be quarried for the stone and timber in them until they vanished completely. Once the village had gone, the road fell into disuse and so it has remained to this day. A similar story can be found at Wycollar but in that case the buildings survived and are now re-occupied.
So, we’ve had a nice little walk and amused ourselves along the way. Next time you have visitors or some children to amuse, take them down to Bracewell and set the puzzle to them and see if their powers of observation are up to the task. Before we go home though, there is the small matter of the strange arrangement of watercourses in the little section of the old road near the beck. I’m not going to suggest that you start tramping all over the fields and climbing fences to follow this one up. Use your heads when I’ve told you what you are looking at and ask permission at Yarlside to go into their land.
What we are looking at is a water power resource. Three hundred yards towards Barlick from the ford there are the remains of a dam across the beck and the dry ditch you saw to the right of the road is a leat or head race drawing water off the reservoir behind the dam and carrying it forward to a mill. The question that faced me when I first looked into this was where the mill was. I found it on the ground before I found a map that showed me where it used to be. If you look at the 1851 OS map for Barlick in the library you’ll find that the mill is way down towards the Coronation Hotel, in the fields to the east of Yarlside. [OS reference SD 862494]
If you get permission and go to the site you’ll find you can identify a small lodge, a place where the mill wheel would be (the remains will still be there under the ground) and best of all if you look carefully, a millstone lies in the ground with just a corner showing. Lift the sod to check that you have found it but replace it so that others can have some fun setting the puzzle for their kids or friends. You can see where the tail race went back to the beck and there is one more clue here that is worth noting. Look at the wall down to the beck very carefully, it is almost certainly made of stone robbed out of the mill and a lot of the stones are red as though they have been burned at some time. There are also some 17th century bricks, you can tell them by the fact they are thinner than a modern brick. Bricks of that age are very unusual in this area. Look at the map again and you’ll see there is a field near the church marked as ‘Kiln Field’, this might have been where these bricks were made. In those days they were never carried far, they were too heavy. I think the burnt stones might be a clue as to what happened to the mill. Corn mills were very prone to fire and this might have been the fate of Bracewell Mill.
Before you leave the mill site, sit on the banking for a while and try to imagine what it would be like when the mill was working. There would be a track going away towards the road at Yarlside but apart from that the mill was totally isolated. The only sounds would be the splashing of the water on the wheel, the rumbling of the stones and the gearing and the sound of birds singing. I’ve often thought that being the miller wasn’t a bad job and whilst there was hard work to be done, you can imagine some quiet moments during a hot summer’s day when a pipe of tobacco and a sit on the grass outside the mill must have been very pleasant.
Right, there you have two puzzles and a nice little country walk. Remember what I was saying at the start of this piece, something like this is a good antidote to screen images and well worth taking children to see, they will get some exercise as well! However, remember that in order to understand what you are seeing you need to look hard and ask questions about what you have observed. It isn’t easy at first but the more you do it the better you become. It is a wonderful skill to cultivate and I am forced to wonder how the producers of the screen images would fare. I suspect very badly.
9th May 2000