On Kilner Bank

On Kilner Bank today a squirrel bounded across my path (a tarmaced road, quiet between trees, closed to through traffic and almost unused by vehicles). Tame, the squirrel stopped to take a look at me, then spun its body as I turned my eyes to the approaching couple, the only other humans I’d seen on that road until then. Two police officers on foot patrol, as seems common in Huddersfield right now.

The WPC’s attention was taken by the squirrel, causing her to make the sort of sounds which humans do when they see a precious creature close-up: an officer of the law indulging in aaahs and ooohs. Meanwhile he greeted me as warmly as anyone has in West Yorkshire. Perhaps I was the only other human they’d seen on that road. We made an odd foursome, the PCs, the squirrel and me, standing together in the middle of a road which requires police patrols because its semi-closed nature – whilst deterring most honest citizens from driving there – invites fly-tippers and joy riders and who knows what other sorts of miscreants to its heavily wooded enclosures.

Kilner Bank rises steeply from the River Colne, a ridge which frames Huddersfield town centre to its west and the hilltop island suburbs of Dalton and Rawthorpe to its east. I’d strained up the Wakefield Road through Moldgreen to Ravensknowle Park, to find the Tolson Memorial Museum closed for the day due to a burst water main, so decided to take the circular journey back into town via the Galpaharm stadium using the route of least resistance, going with the gradients rather than trying to traverse them any more.

I guess that folks who live on hilltop estates learn such routes quickly and very well; I guess that’s another reason why Kilner Bank road, though closed to traffic, still bears the evidence of a lot of human activity, because it smoothly follows the contours along the ridge. I also imagine that that’s the reason why the wooded area just above the sports stadium and cinema is cut across by desire lines – routes which people have created themselves by regular use, to help them ease into that steep transition up to, and down from the Kilner Bank road.

So Kilner Bank is another Huddersfield high place, and it offers particular sorts of humans (seers and sightseers and those who have had many beers) the opportunity to gaze over the town at very close quarters. You can’t just see the buildings from here; you can see the people, below, going about their day. You can see your neighbours and shout down to them. If you’re a police officer you can spot activities going on in the riverside goods yards and leisure centre car parks which you might then report to your patrol car colleagues on the ground.

At night Kilner Bank must offer a special sight of a Huddersfield burning bright with street light, though I imagine that the fires regularly lit up there (abandoned stolen vehicles torched in the trees) mean that this route, in the dark, might be avoided by all but the deviant or the stupid, or (like me till today) the unknowing.