Albert Promenade and Wainhouse Tower, Halifax

That’s Albert as in Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband.  It was built in 1861 by Henry Charles McCrea, an Irishman who moved to Halifax and became a locally well known businessman.  He gave the walk to the town together with West View Park.

It looks down a rocky cliff, known locally as The Rocks, towards the valley below. This is the valley which has the Rochdale Canal, the River Calder, the trans Pennine railway and the A58 road all funnelling through a fairly narrow gap in the hills.  It is a convenient walk when the unpaved paths are muddy and gives some lovely views, changing day to day depending on the weather and angle of the light.

Wainhouse Tower is a folly, originally built as a chimney for a dye works in the valley below.  Above is the view of it from Albert Promenade.

And this is the view of Albert Promenade from the top of the tower.  More photos by AdamKR can be found here.  It gives a good idea of the plateau on which that part of Halifax is built. Off the left of the picture is an area known as Skircoat Green, the most expensive part of Halifax for property.  There is an area of about 73 acres of open land owned by the Savile Family from the 13th Century until 1892 when it came into the ownership of the Halifax Council.  

As ‘Skircoat’ came, so I am told, from the word ‘Schircotes’ which means building on the rocks.

Friday the 13th–A Lovely Day

Despite its reputation as a day for disasters, Friday the 13th January 2012 showed us the best weather so far this year.

It was cold, crisp, there was no wind and, best of all . . . it was sunny.

So off we went to the hills above Haworth for a walk. This lane has some spectacular views across the valley and is quiet enough for a walk – the fields are still very muddy from all the rain.  Incidentally, this deserted lane is a bus route.

The sun is so low in the sky at the moment that the contours of the land stand out starkly.

We came back by a different route to avoid the traffic jam that is Cross Hills and collected a short list of places to go back to, including what looked like a planned village but was Keighley Workhouse in days gone by.

Alan had this exciting Christmas gift from Dave and Tara.   It is now mounted outside his study window.  The bar down is the decorative leading on the window, not a precaution against falling out of the window!

I said in my last post that we were off to research paving for the front garden.  Earlier in the week, we duly ended up at Gordon Riggs Garden Centre – not the one pictured on the front page of their site but the original one near Todmorden.  I think we have decided on paving and tubs but it’s a bit too early in the year for setting things going.

Opposite is Bottoms Mill Shop and Cafe and we popped over for lunch – a bacon buttie for those who want to know.  M’mmm!  I think we appreciate that sort of food all the more because we don’t have it often.

In the shop, is this lovely antique which will play a tune if you put 20p in a slot.  Isn’t it delightful?

January 2012 – Where Does Time Go?

That was a rhetorical question and I don’t expect an answer – unless anyone has a better knowledge of ‘The State of The Universe’ than I do – or even more importantly than Professor Stephen Hawking does.  Happy Birthday! to him – a few days late but I don’t suppose he will mind.

A quote from Hawking is "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet."  I like that and we will continue to try and meet that target this year.

I’d like to follow his advice literally as well as metaphorically so perhaps at least one meteor shower will arrive when we have a clear sky?  The first didn’t so I have to wait till April to find that out.

We hope to make another trip to the USA this year for a family holiday and to see places we have not visited yet.  It looks as if there will be 10 – 13 of us and finding a house we can rent for us all is difficult.  After all, how many families nowadays plan trips with that many members?

We’ve also got a list of places to visit with the caravan this year that would require  some manipulation of the space-time continuum to manage.  We do like a challenge and are bidding on e-bay for a Police Box.  Worth a try?

Alan’s book comes on apace and he still gets a lot of contact and information from his old students – I should, perhaps, call them Alumni rather than ‘old’! To catch up on them go to his website.  It may take a bit of scrolling but we are hoping to improve that soon.  Web technology has come a long way since he started it 7 years ago.  In those days, you had to learn Dreamweaver to build a site and neither of us had the time or inclination to do that.  This blog took me less time to set up than Alan’s site.

My venture of A Yorkshire Cook, born out of numerous queries about recipes and cooking has come on well.  It is climbing the Alexa rankings nicely and visitors are beginning to comment.

As we get to eat the results of my experiments, Alan is happy.  I’m enjoying writing it and also the photography – though food photography turns out to be a tricky new skill to learn.

The weather has been as unpredictable as ever!  Far from the nasty snow and ice of last winter, so far, we have had mild weather.  The rhubarb crop is hampered by lack of frost which is needed to set it into growth. 

We have been lucky in a couple of weeks dominated by high winds.  The most we have seen is the dash for freedom of local wheelie bins which may have caused problems for those who had to go out – we just hunkered down and waited it out.  Then we handed a stray waste food bin, which had wandered into our front garden, to the recycling collectors when they arrived (a day late).

Halifax did make it into the national news when a dormer window was blown off, over a house, taking the chimney stack with it and crashing into the street!

Now we are beginning to put our heads above the parapet and today we are going on an expedition to find the right surface for our front garden.  Small as it is, I can no longer manage it and it depresses me to see weeds and a tangle of growth.  I kick myself that I didn’t think of this when we sorted the tiny back yard which has worked very well with a raised bed.

We hope to sort it this spring and leave me with a rather nice raised trough to play with.  Photos will follow when we have the job done.

West View Park, Halifax

 

West View Park does what it says on the tin.  This is the view and it is due west towards Lancashire.  Like so many people, we tend to neglect our local attractions but are trying to get round them.

Certainly, with the lovely Autumn sun and the leaves turning, we will not find anything better farther afield.

 

The park is on the west edge of Halifax and was proposed by two local businessmen, Mr H C McCrea and Mr E Robinson, in around 1894. The Parks Committee Minutes do not refer to the design of the park; it is implied that the benefactors, McCrea and Robinson, undertook responsibility for the park's layout. In July 1896 the park was opened. We forget how much we owe our Victorian ancestors for establishing such lovely green spaces in our towns.

Most of its ambitious design is now lost but it is still ‘a nice place to be’ and traces of the original design can be found here and there.

And this brave soldier from the Boer War has looked out towards Lancashire since at least 1905.  Perhaps he anticipates a return of the War of the Roses.

Wainstalls and Luddenden

This morning was so bright and sunny that we just had to get out and take advantage of the weather.  We went past Mount Tabor and down a road which goes nowhere except past the popular Cat-i’th-well Inn.

We parked just before the Luddenden Dene Wesleyan Cemetery and walked along the narrow lane to the Cemetery where some orphans from Liverpool, brought over the hills to work in a local mill are buried.  We visited the grave back in February 2010 and haven’t been back since.

One thing I hadn’t thought of before was the amount of room left on the stone for further burials.

It is a lovely spot with views across the valley.  A shame that these children probably never got to enjoy the view.

At the other end of the Cemetery, where the modern burials take place, we found someone we had never heard of – though I wish we had known him as he sounds quite a character.

‘Sithee lata’ is our local dialect for ‘See you later’.

A Google later and I found that he was just known as Malcolm Lund of Wainstalls and died 31st March 2011.  He left 6 children and a partner but I can’t find out anything else about him.  If anyone knows more, I’d love to hear from you.

We walked on and I’ll just share some of the beauty with you – it doesn’t need words.

The last of the blackberries

A woodpecker lives here.

And home for lunch.

Calder and Hebble Canal – Elland Lock to Crowther Bridge

This is another beautiful stretch of the canal walked, or rather strolled, on a warm and rather humid day.  The first of September and some of the trees are changing colour already.  Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t always rain in Yorkshire and the reservoirs are low so I think dry weather is hastening the changes in the leaves.

The building above, now a day nursery looks like an Escher design!

We left the canal at Crowther Bridge.

First going under the bridge.

Marvelling at the way the ropes have eaten into the stone.

And crossing back to the other side and the road by a footbridge as the original bridge is no longer safe.

What Lovely Weather

We’re still stuck at home by various commitments but it has given us the opportunity to explore more of the local area.  It seems crazy that there are places only two or three miles away which we have never explored properly.

Yesterday we went to the end of the ‘Halifax Arm’ and walked along the towpath. Years ago, the Salter & Hebble Navigation had a spur serving Halifax.  All that is left is a short section from the Watermill Restaurant on Salter Hebble Hill down to the junction with the main canal.

After passing under the Wakefield Road, the complex of locks at the junction appears.

At the end of the series of locks and basins is this Guillotine Lock.

The horses would have been led through this tunnel while the boat was hauled under a road bridge by the men.

This is the next section to Cooper Bridge where the Huddersfield Broad Canal connects.  That is for another day!

Wainstalls - a Village School

When we were walking on the hills above Wainstalls on Saturday, we met a man taking photos who had been born up on the moor near Cold Edge Dam – about as high as you can get on the moor – and went to the school in Wainstalls village when he was five years old.  It must have been quite a trek for a little boy of five.  See this map for location. That got me thinking about the school, which is still there, and I found out some of its history.


The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established a system of ‘School Boards’ to build and manage schools where they were needed.  Only two fifth of children between five and ten were estimated to be attending school at that date.  There was some opposition to the idea of universal education  and it was not taken up everywhere – after all, if the working classes learned to ‘think’ they might revolt.  Most schooling for the poorer children had previously been provided by the various Churches, with grants from the Government who were reluctant to lose their influence.  Industrialists were keen, on the whole, arguing that a better educated workforce would improve Britain’s competitiveness.


By today’s standards, they set their sights very low.  Education would be provided from 5 to 12 years of age and the main thrust was to be the 3 Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic.

In 1876 a Royal Commission recommended that education be made compulsory and, in 1880, school attendance became compulsory between the ages of five and ten – though by the early 1890’s attendance within this age group was still falling woefully short.

Wainstalls School opened 10th January 1877 with 84 children, mainly part timers.  This meant that they worked, either in local textile mills or factories for the rest of the day.  I was surprised to read in the school log that by the end of January there were 221 children registered.  At this point there were two teachers including the headmaster!  Two local ladies helped ‘at times’ and monitors (older children) were used to teach the younger ones.
 
The population on the moors must have been much higher then.  We see the ruins of houses in the most unlikely places on the tops and some of the population would be itinerant labour brought in for lambing, shearing and haymaking, so student numbers probably fluctuated a fair bit.

On 2nd November the same year, the school was inspected by HM Inspectors of Schools ‘This is a new school, in a wild and neglected district, which lies at a great height and is terribly exposed in winter to snow and stormy weather.’ they wrote in their report.

The village is only 3.5 miles from Halifax but in 1886 the school log shows ‘Two wanderers from the moors admitted, 11 and 8 respectively.  Know nothing whatever but Aah!’

The local mills ‘imported’ orphans from Liverpool as workers and some attended the school.  That reminded me of a local gravestone which we photographed some years ago.  It is almost impossible to read the names but it says :

                                                   ORPHANS EMPLOYED
                                                                    BY
                                                         I & C CALVERT
                                                         WAINSTALLS
                                       MARY ELLEN CLARK AGED 14 YEARS
                                            ALICE DEVITT AGED 12 YEARS
                                      ELIZABETH EDWARDS AGED 17 YEARS
                                           JANE JOHNSON AGED 12 YEARS
                           SARAH SHAW DIED MAY 17TH 1892 AGED 15 YEARS
                            MARY EMERY DIED JAN 22TH 1895 AGED 15 YEARS
                    ANNIE STEWART DIED MARCH 7TH 1895 AGED 16 YEARS

What struck me as most sad was that the first four children did not even have a date of death recorded.  About 100 children were recruited over several years  from 1879 and the last one still living in the village died in 1966 aged 88.  It seems terrible to think of children being uprooted and taken across the country to a strange place to work in a mill but it was considered a philanthropic gesture on the part of the mill owners to give these children a ‘fresh start’.

It was difficult to get the labour the mills needed at Wainstalls as there was no transport from Halifax – just a horse bus which ran once on Saturdays.  The children under 12 worked ‘half time’ (41/2 hours) and were fed, clothed, housed and given a few pence a week pocket money. Once they were 13, they worked full time - 56 hours a week, Monday to Saturday and had to attend Church on Sundays.  Philanthropy or cheap labour?  (cynical, moi?)

Now the school has 140 children in five classes, its own website with weekly newsletters and podcasts.  The pictures of the children on the website are of happy healthy youngsters and I can’t help wondering what the first Headmaster would think if he could see it now.  Wainstalls school website is here.  Scroll down to the bottom of the ‘About us’ page to open the history documents.