Standing north west of Scammonden Reservoir, on the eastbound edge of the motorway, local farmer Brian raised his voice above the traffic to tell me that the scattered stones by which we stood were until the coming of the M62 a hamlet called Han Head. The people who had lived here – all their long lives – were ‘characters’: particularly the two brothers who farmed each side of the valley and who, both being loud characters, would hold conversations with each other across the valley. They’d be hard pressed to make themselves heard today. As would be the farmer who in protest at the start of work on the motorway in the 1960s tried to drive the contractors away by playing loud music from the roof of his farm. He failed, of course, and we later stood above that farm at Moselden Pasture, just below the Scammonden bridge cutting of today.
The most striking story Brian told me was the simplest. The sister of the shouting brothers never left Han Head in her life – ‘except to be buried’, he said. What struck me while he told me this, was the unending flow of travellers flashing past us. It only took him a minute to relay this tale but in that time probably a few hundred vehicles had passed us by. What a contrast between their lives-in-motion and her so-static existence.
Many of Brian’s stories alerted me to the truth that – contrary to my romantic liberal views of country life versus the urban rush of which the motorway has been catalyst and icon – folks round here have adjusted to the presence of the M62, have recognised the opportunities it has brought. Listening to Brian exploded some myths for me: for instance there’s no village buried beneath Scammonden Waters – an old mill, yes, but the idea of filling that space with water for the local people as far as Huddersfield was championed by a local Methodist lay preacher, an employee of Huddersfield Corporation Waterworks, as the DoT had planned to build a bridge across that valley.
I already knew that it’s an oft-repeated untruth that Ken Wilde of Stott Hall Farm opposed the motorway; Brian reinforced the reality (that they had to split the carriageways around the farm for structural reasons) by telling me that Yorkshire Water own the land anyway so they would have had the final say, not a tenant farmer like Ken Wilde or Brian, whose cattle I had passed when ascending the heights above Stott Hall Farm. At his request the late Ken Wilde is buried up there, above the farm and the shining, awesome roadway surrounding it. His business continues today – sheep were being herded alongside the motorway as I watched from the slopes above.
The rift in Outlane village tells a very real and awful tale, but listening to Brian, and the guy on Leeches Hill happy to be metres from the motorway, and others in this gorgeous and largely manufactured landscape, I realise that many here have a manner of quiet acceptance and openness to change. To them not everything is bad about this great road being cut through here.
I have never seen anyone reverse a vehicle down narrow country lanes with the speed and accuracy that Brian showed time and again, as we met nervous folks in 4x4s coming the opposite way. A lifetime spent moving animals through this area, bringing food to them and checking on their welfare two or three times daily, means that he’s deeply familiar with these lanes. But another thing. He’s driving a modern Volvo with barely a scratch on it. He’s deeply familiar with the land; he’s deeply familiar with the lanes; and he’s deeply familiar with the vehicle too.