Historic Wharfedale - The Navvies Monument
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The latest in the Historical Wharfedale series, small black plastic container with just a log, please remember your own writing implement.
This cache finds us at one end of a ginnel where you can find, at this end the last known in-house "brewery" in Otley. At the other end, a monument to the navvies killed in constructing the nearby Bramhope railway tunnel. The pub is one of the oldest known in Otley, built in 1762, and originally had it's own in house "brewery". The vat house where the ales were brewed still stands and was in use until about 1928. Bramhope tunnel was first proposed in 1843 with an estimate of £800,000 approved in 1845, though the final cost by 1849 was £2,150,313 and the lives of 24 men.Two sighting towers were built for the engineers to keep the line true, then from 20 October 1845 twenty shafts were sunk to enable access for tunnelling. Tunnelling started after the foundation stone was laid at the bottom of No.1 airshaft in July 1846. The separate diggings first joined up into one long tunnel on 27 November 1848, and it was completed in summer 1849. The southern entrance or Portal is usually described as plain. The north portal is castellated, and after it was finished was lived in for a while by railway workers, this was listed Grade II in 1988. The finished tunnel is 2 miles, 243 yd long; 25.5 feet wide by 25 feet high. It is a double track tunnel, with a gradient of 1 in 94 (0.01%) down from Horsforth to Arthington and at its deepest point, just to the north of Breary Lane, it is 290 feet below the surface. The construction was for the Leeds Northern Railway and the East and West Yorkshire Junction Railway, which together later became the North Eastern Railway. The grand opening was 9 July 1849, but the first train went through on 31 May in the same year, carrying Leeds and Thirsk railway officials, and pulled by Bray's Locomotive "Stephenson". There were possibly up to 2,300 navvies plus their families, with 400 horses brought in for the work. For four years they lived in 200 wooden bothies with their families in a field opposite Bramhope cemetery. There were 100 more bothies elsewhere along the line of the tunnel. Day– and night–shifters were said to take turns to use the beds, as was normal for sailors of the time. However, sailors had their own bedding to unroll onto the bare bunk or hammock, whereas many navvies may have had little of their own. This tunnel was built at the height of the Hungry Years, and many Irish refugees were working on the railways. Men were lowered by bucket down the air shafts to dig by candlelight. They were paid £1.50 per week to shovel 20 tons of rock and earth per 12–hour shift, seven days a week. Conditions were constantly wet, with foul air and gunpowder fumes plus the danger of roof–collapse. This was because the tunnel cuts through hard sandstone, shale and clay, and there are seven major faults in the rock near the centre point. Metal sheets had to be used to divert water inside the tunnel. The work was dangerous because the rock at the Horsforth end was difficult to blast, and there was frequent flooding and subsidence. It is suggested that up to 1,563,480,000 gallons of water were pumped out between 1845 and 1849. Five men died in 1846; 12 died in 1847; seven more had died by 1849, making 24 in total. This monument in the shape of the north portal, is dedicated to the 24 men who lost their lives. Records of death and injury were kept from 1847 to 1849, and Leeds Infirmary had a special spring cart to ferry the injured to hospital from the site to Leeds. Drunkenness and fighting was such that Jos Midgeley, a railway police inspector, was hired for £1.25 per week to keep order. At one time he was attacked by a group of men, and at another there was a riot at Wescoe Hill in which a man died, all because the contractors tried to cut off the beer supply.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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