Cache 2: Great Meadow
This is a good place to look back at the village and its setting.
Beamsley Beacon is prominent across the valley in the distance and there is the former Burnside Mill just below to the right (now converted into flats). There are the roofs of old buildings along the Main St, with newer housing beyond and many farm fields on the slopes, some reaching almost to the village centre. Some field boundaries consist of hedges and trees, others, such as the one here next to the path are made of dry-stone walls.
Over the centuries the village has changed from a small farming community centred on Sugar Hill in medieval times, to the industrial village of ‘Long Addingham’, with its weaving sheds, textile mills, workers housing, shops, and pubs. These were mainly built in the 19th century filling in the spaces between the old farmsteads, barns and cottages along Main Street & Church Street.
The old buildings used local stone, Millstone Grit, for both walls and roofing slates although with the building of canals and railways it was easier to bring in material from elsewhere and so Welsh slate started to be used as a cheaper, easier roofing material rather than the traditional large heavy millstone grit slates.
The footpath you have just walked up is a very old path. Before the age of cars it would have been the main route into the village for those living on farms on the Moorside.
Just over the wall to the east you will see a large ash tree standing in the middle of the field. It is over 200 years old, protected by a Tree Preservation Order (TPO) and home to a family of barn owls.
In the north-west corner of the field next to the one you’re standing in there is an old shed (hidden in summer by the leaves of an ash tree) called the “Coal pit building”. This is the place where in 1845 there was an unsuccessful attempt to find coal by sinking a deep shaft, now filled in, into the ground. The prospectors had little geological understanding; workable coal seams do not occur in the rocks below Addingham but in younger rocks found to the east.