Stanley,  I guess your PC alerts you to new posts....?

There's a fascinating bit of walling between Hebden Bridge and Stoodley PIke. South of the town just up the hillside from a settlement called Horsehold (an old packhorse royd, I'm sure) is an area of several acres where at each junction of the walls enclosing some small fields, the waller has built a little "diamond" instead of just bringing the walls together in a conventional cross. The diamonds are now filled with mature trees but every time I cycle or walk past there I wonder why they did it. You can even see them on the 1:25,000 OS map. Any ideas?

Another early riser, eh?

I came back to this post this morning to add the grid ref SD986262, you can see the walls if you cut & paste this into the search box here: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/getamap/

I guess these are the straight walled rectangular enclosures from 1801 to 1820, which you mention in the resume above. 

One other point - above Lumbutts, a couple of miles SW of Hebden Bridge, are some fine examples of Pennine packhorse trails. This is a subject, which fascinates me. I got so interested in it that I even had an article published in a mountain bike magazine, in which I described a ride along one of these amazing ways of close packed stones.  Lumbutts is also the home of Sue Hogg, of the South Pennines Packhorse Trails Trust, who has spent hours researching old trails and then going to court to get them reinstated as bridleways for the benefit of horse riders. It was she who put me onto the Magna Via, the main trunk of the packhorse trails, now a scheduled ancient monument, which climbs out of Halifax. Did you know for example that a hollow way is the V shaped groove worn in the ground by the passing of thousands of pack horses, and that Holloway in North London is so-called because it was the main route for all the freight into and out of London, before the canals, railways or roads? 

Here's the first article, the others are called 'Transport in Barlick'.  Go to them via forum search.

BADGERS, BROGGERS, GALLS AND JAGGERS.

I couldn’t resist the title and I’ll put you out of your misery straight away if I have confused you. A ‘badger’ is an ancient name for a tradesman who was licensed to deal in corn. A ‘brogger’ was similar but dealing in wool, yarn or cloth. A ‘gall’ is short for a Galloway, a small hardy breed of horse much favoured by packhorse proprietors and ‘jagger’ is the same but a small bred German cavalry horse, the name comes from the German word jaeger or hunter.

I was asked a question the other day about packhorses and realised how little I knew about the trade so I thought I’d do a bit of digging. The results have been enlightening so I thought I’d have another look at transport over the last 1000 years in Barlick. You may have to bear with me for a week or two because it’s a big story.

There has never been a time in human history when transport was not important. Even our nomadic ancestors 10,000 years ago had to carry their possessions when they moved from one hunting ground to another. For thousands of years this was the norm, if you wanted to shift something you put it on your back and walked. We still do it today when we carry the shopping home from the supermarket.

As recently as the late 19th century weavers were walking with packs on their backs to where they obtained their yarn and sold their cloth. There is a reference in ‘The Rambler’ of 1906 where Mr Stephen Clarke tells of a conversation with an old handloom weaver in Blacko who told him that he used to carry his finished pieces of cloth eight miles to Clitheroe and he knew two weavers in Grindleton who regularly walked 10 miles from there to Barnoldswick for their warp and weft, almost certainly dealing with a branch of the Bracewell family. The packs they carried would be about 40lbs weight (18kg).

We should ask ourselves a question here. What if the weight was more than a man could carry or was further than a day’s march? The modern answer would be some form of wheeled transport and the assumption might be that this would be the case say 500 years ago but if we are thinking about Barlick, or anywhere north of a line from Bristol to the wash in England we would almost certainly be wrong. Graham, in his book ‘The Social Life of Scotland in the eighteenth century’ relates how when a load of coals was carried by cart from East Kilbride to Cambuslang in 1723 ‘crowds of people went out to see the wonderful machine. They looked with surprise and returned with astonishment’. Admittedly the further North you went the more backward the technology but as late as 1607 the Parish of Weybridge in Surrey asked to be excused from supplying transport for the Queen’s journey to Oatlands on the grounds that they had ‘but one cart in the Parish’. A traveller in Northumberland reported in 1749 that there wasn’t a cart in the county.

We might be forgiven for wondering why this was the case. The answer lies in the absence of roads as we know them in the North of England. There was no road between Liverpool and Manchester until 1760. In 1718, in Derbyshire, the justices decided to build a ‘horse bridge’ at the Alport ford because of the ‘great drifts of London Carrier’s horses, malt horses and other daily traffic and carriers.’ No mention at all of wheeled traffic on one of the busiest routes in the kingdom, what is now the A6. The pressure of commerce demanded better transport and in 1663 the first turnpike trust from London to York on the Great North Road was established. There was a great expansion in the 1750s-70s, thousands of trusts and companies were established by Acts of Parliament with rights to collect tolls in return for providing and maintaining roads. A General Turnpike Act was passed in 1773 to speed up the process of setting up such arrangements.

This doesn’t mean that there were no wheeled vehicles at all, simply that the crude carts that existed were only used locally. So, in terms of Barlick we’re fairly safe in assuming that it wasn’t until early in the 18th century that local turnpikes made carriage of goods between the major towns possible. Before this everything had to be carried by packhorse and passengers were accommodated on ‘pad nags’, a packhorse with a ‘pad’ or crude saddle instead of the usual packs.

Two facts became clear to me when I started to look into this subject. The first is that I had always had this romantic view of man and a lad with a train of a few packhorses plodding along a salter’s way, perhaps even over the Salter’s Ford’ (Salterforth) on a summer’s day. In reality it seems that there was much more traffic than I had imagined, even on a local basis. The local tracks would have been busy and this raises the question of how many horses were employed in the trade, where were they based and how much traffic there was.

The second fact that emerged was the range of goods that needed to be transported. Even in a self-sufficient economy such as Barlick in the 16th century there were certain goods that had to be brought in. Corn, coal, lime, salt and bar iron spring to mind. What really surprised me was the fact that there were well established trades in perishable goods. I have no direct evidence for Barlick but I’ve found references to fresh salmon being carried from Carlisle to London and even more surprising, live carp! The latter could be kept alive for many days if packed in a hamper of wet straw and so were perfectly fresh on arrival. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that anyone in Barlick could afford fresh salmon at four shillings a pound in 1724 but it is as well to take note that such things were possible.

Right, we’ve set the scene. Next week I’ll look at the Barlick traffic in more detail.

SCG/19 September 2005
1034 words.

Found and read all with fascination, thanks. This thread has drifted from walling to packhorses, it's a bit like the US military's "mission creep". Would it be worth having a packhorse trails section?

I'm not  "horsey" but I would LOVE to see a packhorse train in action. These were the early equivalent of today's white van; they charged around the countryside at a fair old lick, stopping for nobody. The only place I know, which has a packhorse is Beamish near Consett. There must be enough galls around (now known as fell ponies or dale ponies depending on which side of the Pennines) to put together a good-sized train. Trouble is, I guess the ponies were long accustomed to travelling together because there was a hierarchy and a leading mare. It would probably not be easy to re-create the order and speed of an experienced train in just a weekend no matter how enthusiastic the human participants!

I saw this bullock team in NSW 20 years ago.  Ten bullocks and all controlled with the whip.  Very impressive and this would have been a common site here 300 years ago but perhaps not as many in a team.  I talked to the bloke and he said that they used to use any bullock they could lay their hands on, no special breed.  His family had been in the game for years.