Anybody visiting Horbury might be interested to learn about some of its history. Horbury is part of the West Yorkshire Urban Area and was historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Situated north of the River Calder three miles south west of Wakefield two miles to the south of Ossett, it includes the outlying areas of Horbury Bridge and Horbury Junction. At the last census the population was just over ten thousand. Historically the industries associated with Horbury were predominantly woollens, engineering and building wagons for the railways but the area has transformed over the years to become now largely residential..
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Being on the Calder may well have given Horbury its original name. The name Horbury is first attested in 1086 as Horberie. It can be derived from Old English horu 'dirty land' and burh which translates as 'filthy fortification' or 'stronghold on muddy land'. Other spellings include Orberie, Horbiry. The name possibly referred to a fortification near an old fording point of the River Calder. Dating from before the Domesday Book of 1086, Horbury and a neighbouring village, Crigglestone on the south side of the River Calder, were the only part of the Manor of Wakefield not described as "waste"..
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Connected via a fording point over the River Calder, Horbury and Crigglestone were mentioned together in the Domesday Book. The Domesday Book recorded about 40 people and four ox-drawn ploughs in 'Orberie' and 'Crigeston' combined. There were about 400 acres of land in cultivation and much woodland. The village appears to have been typically Anglo Saxon being a small settlement near to a ford in a river with a main hall in the centre, provided with a central hearth for warmth. There may also have been a small Saxon church made of wood and thatch. There was certainly a Norman church by about 1106 with a tower, nave and chancel.
Dwelling houses in Saxon times were very primitive, huts made of wood and thatch, one room shared by everybody, including the oxen at one end. The Horbury villagers were probably subsistence farmers, that is growing all their own food with nothing to spare. Their diet was meagre at best being principally bread eggs and cheese and vegetable, there was little meat as this was a luxury reserved for the rich. They grew crops of wheat, barley and rye, peas, cabbages, parsnips, carrots and celery. They also ate fruit such as apples, blackberries, raspberries and sloes. They also raised herds of goats, cattle and pigs and flocks of sheep. Life was hard.
Earl Warenne became the Lord of the Wakefield Manor in 1106 as a gift from King William. Sir Robert de Horbiry and Sir John de Horbiry were at the time Stewards to the Earl de Warenne and he granted Sir John the village of Horbury and its lands for life. The oldest surviving house in the village is Horbury Hall which is situated in Church Street, this has been dated by dendrochronology to 1474. Other old buildings include a tithe barn. Land in Horbury was divided into three great fields, Northfield, Southfield and Westfield, and remains of medieval ridge and furrow strip cultivation are still visible today in Carr Lodge Park.
Furrows formed by the ridge and furrow method of cultivation took many years to develop; this was as a result of repeated ploughing with non-reversible ploughs on the same strip of land each year. This system of ploughing was in widespread use in Europe during the Middle Ages being typical of the “open field system”. Under the open field system, each manor had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The strips were cultivated by individuals or peasant families. The farmers customarily lived in individual houses in a small village with a much larger manor house and church nearby.
Goods manufacture in the form of wool spinning and cloth making first developed in Horbury as cottage industries but at the start of the industrial revolution steam engines for driving factory machinery were introduced in Horbury at Race's Mill at Dudfleet and in Foster's Mill, the engine at Foster's Mill was installed in 1795. The nearby road was named "Engine Lane". There was resistance to the implementation of new textile machinery and the factory system. This development shifted weaving from the home into large mills. Luddites, who blamed new factories for depriving weavers from earning a living in a time of widespread hunger and poverty, destroyed Fosters Mill in April 1812.
Horbury mill owners were already well aware of the activities of the Luddites locally as a large number had based their training and meeting place at Grange Moor, only a few miles to the west. Mr Foster had tried to take precautions against them by stationing his two sons in the mill at night where they slept, presumably restlessly. However on a night in early April 1812 about 300 Luddites marched on the mill, tied up the Fosters, smashed the machinery and tried to set the mill on fire. Fourteen of these Luddites were later caught and hanged at York Castle.
Industrialisation gathered pace in Horbury during the nineteenth century. William Sykes’s leather goods works, which eventually became part of Slazengers, was established in 1870. The business prospered and a few years later added footballs to the other leather goods it was making. The Sykes Zigzag branded football was used in many leading events including the FA cup finals of 1936, 1937, 1939 and 1946. Sykes subsequently expanded his business by dealing in cricket bats, before moving into their manufacture. Donald Bradman, widely acknowledged as the greatest Test batsman of all time, used bats produced by Sykes throughout his cricket career.
Joinery was Charles Roberts first occupation and he moved the Buffer and Wagon Works he had established on Ings Road, Wakefield to a site at Horbury Junction in 1873. Between 1901 and 1956 the company had built one hundred and ten thousand railway wagons of varying types and by 1945 the works site covered 45 acres. During the First World War the firm was among the first to employ women who forged shell covers. During the Second World War the wagon works was used for armament manufacture, and it made one thousand three hundred Churchill tanks, half a million naval shells and one and a half million trench mortar bombs.
Knowledge is Power is the stone engraving above Horbury Carnegie Library; Horbury has always been well served by schools. The Town School on Tithe Barn Street was enlarged in 1789, by 1870 there were 113 pupils, it is not known when it was built; it closed in 1886. St Peter's Church of England School was founded in 1849 close to the church. It was replaced by the present building in the early 1980s. In September 2010 St Peter's Junior School joined Clifton Infant School to form a new primary school. A new school on the St Peter's site was recently completed.
Later, Horbury Council School, catering for all age groups, was opened on Northfield Lane in 1913 becoming Horbury County Secondary Modern in 1952. The infant school remained on the site but the junior school later moved to the Wesleyan School at Horbury Junction. In 1962 pupils moved to a new school and the Northfield Lane school became Horbury County Junior School and Horbury County Infant School. After a fire in 2000 and a one million pound upgrade the schools amalgamated, becoming Horbury Primary School in 2002. Horbury School caters for students aged eleven to sixteen in a new building completed in 2009 on the same site as the old one.
Congratulations to Gingernutters and dfuk on JFTF and using their initiative. But it would still be nice to see the coordinates worked out from the clues. Hint has been changed to be more helpful in this regard and less helpful in scouring the area (almost) randomly. Anybody who can send us the correct coordinates by email, having worked them out, will get a special mention and a bonus point (virtual of course). 
***desertfoxuk gets the special mention and bonus point for providing the correct coordinates. Well done, nice to know the puzzle works. J&M***.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on GeoChecker.com.