Calderdale - Halifax to Pontefract - Including Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Wakefield
Above: The old market, Halifax from an old postcard
The streams that feed the River Calder rise in the moors to the west of Halifax near the Lancashire-Yorkshire border near the town of Todmorden which traditionally split in two by the two counties. A canal near Todmorden links the river with Rochdale across the border near Manchester. To the east of Todmorden, the canal is joined by the Hebden Water at Hebden Bridge, a former mill town best known for its clog factory. To the north of Hebden Bridge are the steep-sided hardcastle Crags, a prperty of the National Trust. Nearby is Heptonstall a former weaving village, which has a seventeenth century stone school building
The River Calder continues east from Hebden Bridge to Halifax, through Brighouse, north of Huddersfield and from there to Mirfield near the outskirts of Dewsbury and on to Horbury and Wakefield. It joins the River Aire at Castleford to the north of Pontefract. The River Aire continues east to join the Humber by a circuitous route but close to Pontefract at Knottingley the Aire is joined by a canal called the Calder and Aire Navigation. This canal links the whole Calder and Aire river sytem (see Airedale) with the River Don near Hatfield, ultimately linking up to the River Humber near the port of Goole.
Halifax is located south west of Bradford where the Hebble valley flows south to join the Calder. It was a town that grew because of the cloth trade and even its name derives from Haly Flex Field meaning the place where holy banners were made from flax. In 1175 Halifax was called Haliflex.
Halifax has a spectacular location in among the hills and one of the best views can be obtained from neighbouring Beacon Hill. Nearby is Shibden Hall in Shibden Dale which was the fifteenth century home of the Otes family. For the next 300 years it was owned by the Listers who lived there until 1933.
Halifax is a busy town well known for its shopping arcades and markets. Notable buildings in Halifax include the old Piece Hall a quadrangled hall with 315 rooms dating from 1779. Here cloth merchants displayed pieces of cloth for sale on market days. In 1871 the open space within the massive hall became the site of a fruit and vegetable market. The Town Hall of 1863 was built by Charles Barry who built the Houses of Parliament. Wainhouse tower , an elaborate factory chimney built for a dye house that was never used dates from 1871. Two churches of note in Halifax are All Souls, built by Sir Gilbert Scott and the fourteenth century Church of St John the Baptist where a lifesize wooden figure of a seventeenth century Halifax beggar called Old Tristram can be seen. There are some Georgian houses in Halifax including Somorset House in George Street while older buildings include the Union Cross Inn , first mentioned in 1535.
The remains of the Halifax Gibbet can be seen in Gibbet Street. Relinquished in the seventeenth century, the gibbet was originally used to protect cloth makers from theft. Anyone found guilty of stealing cloth had their heads cut off at the guillotine-like gibbet. Fifty people were executed here between 1550 and 1650.
Local museums in Halifax include the Bankfield Museum, with a collection of textiles, the Calderdale Industrial Museum and a Museum of Childhood.
Huddersfield, lies four or five miles across the other side of the Calder in the Colne valley. It was called Odersfelt in the Domesday Book. Huddersfield is another cloth making town, best known for producing fancy woollen cloths. Most of Huddersfield was laid out in the early nineteenth century along the Colne valley, where mills were built along the banks of the river. Its church dedicated to St Peter, is a Norman foundation rebuilt in 1834-26. The Town Hall at Huddersfield dates from 1875. Huddersfield's industrial growth absorbed surrounding villages in the nineteenth century. These include the village of Almondbury, which has an iron age camp located on Castle Hill nearby.
Almondbury camp is situated on a 900 ft bluff with three steep sides and dates from around 300 BC. It was abandoned sometime after the arrival of the Romans. A castle was built on the site some time after the Norman Conquest, but was dismantled by Henry III. A tower called the Jubilee towerwas built on the site of the hill fort in 1899. Almondbury was the site of a market as early as the thirteenth century and here the local cloth was traded until the establishment of Huddersfield market in 1672.
Dewsbury is situated to the south of Leeds and Bradford half way between Huddersield and Wakefield. dewsbury is an industrial town with an Anglo-Saxon name name referring to a watery 'burgh' or fortified manor. It may have been an important place in Anglo-Saxon times when the Christian missionary called paulinus preached here in the days of Edwin, King of Northumbria. Dewsbury has a church dating from the 13th to the 19th century.
Batley lies west of Dewsbury and is in an area associated with Yorkshire's Savile family. Neighbouring Birstall was the birthplace in 1733 of Joseph Priestley one of the first men to discover the gasses oxygen and nitrogen. Priestley, not to be confused with the twentieth century Yorkshire author J.B Priestely moved to the United States in 1794 and lived there until his death in 1804. Priestley's statue in the market place shopws him performing an experiment with a candle in one hand and a jar in the other.
A house known as the Rydings at Birstall near Batley is said to have been the inspiration for Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (See Haworth).
Robin Hood is associated with this area and he arguably has stronger connections with this area than he had with Nottinghamshire. He is said to be buried somewhere in the neighbourhood of Mirfield, west of Dewsbury.
Wakefield's history goes back to pre-Roman times but in the Anglo-Saxon era it passed to someone called Waca - and Waca's Field later became Wakefield. Wakefield was important for weaving and dyeing and by the thirteenth century was the most important centre for weaving and dyeing in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In later centuries its industrial role was eclipsed by Leeds and Bradford.
Remnants of Wakefield's Medieval Age include street names like Westgate, Northgate and Kirkgate and a six hundred year old 'Old Bridge' with nine arches. the bridge has a medieval chapel built on it, one of only a few bridge chapels surviving in the country. The chapel dedicated to St Mary was built in the 1300s but was restored by George Gilbert Scott in a later century. Traffic now crosses the 'New Bridge' of 1933.
Wakefield's Cathedral Church of All Saints was first built in Norman times but was rebuilt in 1329 and a Clerestory was built in 1470. The church was raised to the stature of cathedral when Wakefield gained a bishopric and became a city in 1888. It is thought to have the the tallest tower of any church in Yorkshire. An unusual reminder of Wakefield's Medieval times are the surviving scripts of the Wakefield Mystery Cyle, a series of plays performed by the craft guilds of Wakefield in times gone by. The plays are performed from time to time.
Sandal Magna, now swallowed up by the southern outskirts of Wakefield was once the home of Sandal castle, built in the 12th century, but of which nothing now remains. It was the ancestral home of the Warren family and was a one time home of King Richard III.
John Carr born in 1723, the Yorkshire architect ca,me from Horbury near Wakefield. Carr later went on to become a Freeman of York in 1757 and the Lord Mayor of York in 1770.
The boundaries of Wakfield's Metropolitan Borough extend beyond the town itself to include the neighbouring mining town of Normanton and further west the towns of Castleford and Pontefract.
CAKES AND CASTLE
Pontefract is located a few miles from Castleford, where the River Calder joins the River Aire (See Leeds and Airedale). Pontefract was originally called Taddensclyff - a shelf of land belonging to an Anglo-Saxon called Taedden, but it was later rnamed Kirkby by the Vikings, meaning the village with a church. The name of Pontefract means broken bridge and is part French, part Latin. This name was recorded in 1090 but it is not known how a bridge came to be broken here. In 1190 the name of Pontefract occurs under the spelling Pumfrate. Pumfrate or Pomfret reflected the Norman French pronunciation of the place name and this pronunciation is still sometimes used today.
'Bloody Pomfret' castle is referred to in Shakespeare's Richard II and has been a stage for much history. Pontefract Castle was built in the 12th century by Ilbert de Lacy, whose grandson, also called Ilbert de Lacy founded Kirkstall Abbey near Leeds. The castle later passed into the hands of the Earls of Lancaster , whose numbers included Thomas, who was brought here after a battle at Boroughbridge and beheaded in 1322.
King Richard II was another to suffer at Pontefract castle - he was kept prisoner and murdered here. James I of Scotland was imprisoned here, as was Charles, Duke of Agnicourt (captured at Agnicourt ) and many other unfortunate people were executed here during the Wars of the Roses. Owners of the castle included John of Gaunt (1340-1399) who once entertained Chaucer here. Other visitors to the castle at Pontefract have included King Henry IV and King Edward IV. The Castle was a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War but was pulled down by the Parliamentarian folk of Pontefract after its surrender in 1648.
Pontefract is centred on a long street-like market place where a number of eighteenth century buildings can be seen including the Town Hall of 1785. There is also a Butter Cross of 1734 and a Red Lion Hotel reworked by Robert Adam in 1776. Two chambers below a hospital in Southgate were the site of a 14th century hermitage built in 1368 by a monk called Adeam de Laythorpe. Pontefract's St Giles Church became a parish church in 1789. It is mostly an 18th century church but parts of the building date back to medieval times.
Pontefract is perhaps best known for the famous Pontefract Cakes, a liquorice sweet manufactured and sold here since the seventeenth century. The sweets were developed by a chemist called George Dunhill in 1760 who mixed the liquorice with sugar. The liquorice was originally grown in fields around the town, but is now imported from abroad.
HIGH ACKWORTH to the south of Pontefract is the site of a church where the body of St Cuthbert was temporarily brought to rest during its journey north to Durham City. The village has another connection with Durham City, as the church is the burial place for a former Champion Boxer and Durham coal owner called John Gully. John Gully was once the Member of Parliament for Pontefract. (See Durham City - John Gully).
Nostell Priory, an Augustinian foundation established in 1110 lay to the west of Ackworth. Nothing remains of the priory today, but a Georgian mansion also called Nostell Priory stands on its site. It was built by James Paine in the Palladian style and was historically the home of the Winn family. Since 1953 it has been a prperty of the National Trust.
Castleford to the north of Pontefract is located close to where the River Calder joins the River Aire . It was originally Caestere Ford - the site of an Anglo-Saxon ford near a Roman fort or settlement known to the Romans as Legiolium. Castleford is famous for making glass, especially glass bottles. It is also famous for the following poem composed in pre-industrial times which desribes the town's location between the River Aire and River Calder.
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