A cache by [DELETED_USER]
Hidden
:
9/14/2013
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(micro)
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This is a peaceful marina where a lot of people live and visit- Please watch out for muggles in the form of boat dwellers, pub visitors, and ducks. They can often spend a lot of time on the towpath! (All of these groups!!) Please bring your own pen to sign the waterproof paper)***CONGRATS TO OVERANOUT AND JASON JOHNSON FTF***
Here's some history of Mirfield: It has often been conceded by antiquaries that Mirfield boasts a local history more interesting than that of most towns of its size in the West Riding. Certainly, from its first appearance in the early written record of organised life in these islands, as an entry in the Domesday Book ("Mirefelt: Six carucates of land, each as much as two oxen can plough in a year"), it has caught quite a few of the facets of the English tale through the ages. Until 1261, Mirfield had no parish church - only a chapelry because in Saxon days Dewsbury was the centre of the far-flung parish of no less than 400 square miles. Then a dispensation was granted and the first church was built in Mirfield. Its tower still stands beside the present fine parish church, designed by Sir Gilbert Scott himself, made and consecrated in 1871. It cost £22,000. Sir Gilbert made suggestions for the preservation of the tower of the old church after the nave and chancel had been pulled down, providing, incidentally, part of the stone from which the former Eastthorpe School, now Eastthorpe Visual Arts, was built. The 14th century found Mirfield a flourishing centre of the woollen industry and already a place of some agricultural and industrial importance. In 1378, the Poll Tax in Mirfield was 59 shillings, which, it need hardly be stressed, represented a sum out of all proportion to today's money values! Huddersfield produced 19 shillings and fourpence and Halifax 12 shillings and eightpence. Many important families settled in Mirfield, the Hoptons, Saviles, Thornhills and Beaumonts among them, and the remains of some of the fine halls they built may still be seen. At Battyeford, near Warren House, were the butts where local men mastered the art of the longbow. During the Middle Ages, and later when the Civil War swept the country, the district seems to have raised its quota when military needs had to be met. One of the few relics of defence surviving in the district appears to be the mound near St. Mary's Parish church graveyard. Pontefract, a mediaeval historian, describes it as "a moat and baily castle made by Ilbert de Lacey (who owned Hopton Hall) as a minor stronghold to support his possession of manors, "The church was built in the courtyard of the castle." In January 1642, the Civil War came near to the locality when Sir Thomas Fairfax wrote to the Constable of Mirfield ordering "all that be of able bodyes from the age of 16 to 60 to repair to Almondbury on Saturday with all weapons they can procure and provisions for five days" to assist "in driving out the Papist army," The Constable was warned "to fail not at your peril". The Pretender Charles threw his shadow across the neighbourhood, too, with more spectacular results. When he and his army were marching to Derby in 1745, he produced something like mass-panic in Mirfield. Fearful that the Scots were going to sack the town, men and women hurried with personal belongings and food which they hid in local coal workings.The River Calder yielded, in Ismay's time, "salmon, trout, smelts, graylings, dace, perch, eels, chub, parbles, and gudgeon, and about it are found wild duck, widgeon, tea, coots and several sorts of water hens, especially in great frosts". There was a great frost too, in 1772 when the diary relates: "The country was seized with so great a freezing that people did skate on the Calder all its length from Mirfield to Brigg House and carts and horses did pass freely across without danger thereto." London had its Great Plague in 1665, but a similar scourge had taken a deadly toll in Mirfield 34 years earlier. Workmen digging for foundations for a new house at Snake Hill uncovered a pit almost filled with human bones - without doubt those of some 130 men, women and children who died when a pestilence struck the town in 1631. A woman was thought to have brought the infection from the south of England and records tell us, "pits were dug at Littlemoor and Eastthorpe Lane wherein were interred a vast numbers of bodies. Some were put to rest in the churchyard, but many did bury their dead near their houses". A stone memorial, formerly in the old church and now preserved in the Parish church, records the plague with which, it declares "it pleased God to correct ye Parish of Mirfield". Roe Head, once a school for refined young ladies, a former training college and now home to Holly Bank School for youngsters with physical and learning difficulties, had strong connections with the Brontes. In 1831 Charlotte Bronte of Haworth arrived and later became a teacher there, her sisters Emily and Anne were among pupils there. Anne was later employed as a governess at Blake Hall by the Ingham family. Background and "atmosphere" gained during their stay in Mirfield found their way, very naturally into a number of the three sisters' famous writings. Mirfield not only shared in the benefits of the Industrial Revolution but also in the disorders which its early stages brought, at a time when local textile workers feared that the new power looms must inevitably mean unemployment and misery for themselves and their families. There seems little doubt that Mirfield men were among the Luddites who gathered near the Three Nuns Inn, not far from Robin Hood's reputed burial place in Kirklees Park, one night in 1812. They marched across the fields and attacked Rawfolds Mill in Cleckheaton where the new looms had been installed. The military had been warned, the raid failed and numbers of Luddites were hanged at York. Inevitably, however, the machine age developed - and so did Mirfield, not only industrially, but also as a communications centre. It had been served by the canal since 1766 and the railway which reached the town in 1848 eventually brought additional employment as well as advancing commercial prosperity.
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