West Marton and brick supply.

[Stanley]

West Marton and brick supply.

03 August 2004

I was with David Nelson at Old Gledstone Stables this morning and we were talking about the wonderful brickwork. David mentioned that Cecil Southwell had told him once that he had heard that the bricks were made on the estate. David had no knowledge of this.

It was the Roundells who built the stables early in the 19th C and local legend is that they were built larger than would normally be required as they were to be capable of accommodating a troop of cavalry with men and equipment. David said that he thought this could be true as the Roundells were involved in the local militia and a troop of cavalry was based at West Marton for a while.

The stables are interesting because they are square on the outside but have a round courtyard inside. This means that some very fancy building and brickwork was required. The side of the stables facing where the old hall stood is faced with dressed stone and the other three sides are rubble stone. The carcass of the building is brick.

This triggered me off because the only local brickworks that I know of was the one below Park Close Quarry on Salterforth Lane. The Roundells owned this land and I wondered whether they were working Park Close Quarry and had founded the brickworks to use the offal. The other main ingredient for brick is fuel for firing the kilns and this would fit as it was possible to bring coal into Barnoldswick by canal after 1800.

I once asked Harold Duxbury about the quality of brick from Park Close and he said that they weren’t good bricks, they didn’t weather well and were only useful for lining the insides of stone buildings. It seems that this was mostly what they were used for.

Looking at the actual structure of the stables it is noticeable that where the bricks are exposed to the weather, even though these were obviously a better sample, they are weathering noticeably. Inside the colonnade around the central courtyard the best bricks have been used for the pillars and the facings of the walls, above this level, in the vaulting, there is a far poorer sample. Badly fired cracked bricks and mis-shapes abound.

I strongly suspect that these are Park Close bricks and I am perfectly content to make the assumption that this is so. The Roundells most probably founded the brickworks and used part of the product to build the stables. I shall work on this assumption until better evidence comes to light.

SCG/03 August 2004