A square Mile of Barns
During lockdown I decided to add interest to my walks by conducting an amateur survey of a square mile of hillside above my house. I was looking for barns, mostly with the distinctive basket arch doorways so familiar in this area. Constructed during the late C17 through to the early C19 these barns would have accommodated carts, horses, hay and a cow or two. I was amazed to discover 32 within that square mile! Of course, most of them have since been converted into desirable residences and the few remaining working farms have much bigger metal buildings.
The old barns are a living record of an era of intense productivity before the industrial revolution. The hillsides of the Upper Calder Valley are dense with springs, so each house had its own water supply - there was no need to build around a village pond. Although they produced their own food, farming was hard in the difficult terrain. So they developed the clothing trade, spinning and weaving cloth, stretching it on tenterhooks to dry and then taking it on packhorses to Halifax and Heptonstall to sell to the merchants.
Daniel Defoe on his journey through Calderdale in 1722 remarked that “…the steep hillsides…were spread with houses, and that very thick……this whole country…is yet infinitely full of people…the people here, however laborious, generally live to a great age…the country is ….as healthy as any part of England”. He was enthralled “…it was the most agreeable sight I ever saw…high to the tops, and low to the bottoms, it was all the same; innumerable houses and tenters, and a white piece upon every tenter”.
I’m amazed at how much energy was invested in building so many barns. Mental, physical, financial. How skilled and motivated must these people have been to build these robust structures that still stand today?
That way of life disappeared when the machines took over and the mills and the jobs came down into the valley. I’m not nostalgic - we can’t live that way now. But perhaps we can find inspiration from our ancestors, and look for ways to make the most of our local environment as we take on the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity.
by Sue Mellis
