Category: Walking the M62

The B&B we’re staying in backs onto the mysteriously-named Boggart Hole Clough, so when I met Phil at Piccadilly we decided that we would spend our day walking our way back there, searching for evidence of Mancunian Boggart activity as we went.

A Boggart, for the uninitiated, is a sprite, a mischievous spirit mainly found in Lancashire and Yorkshire, often thought to be responsible for poltergeist activity and pranks like turning the doorstep milk sour, making things disappear and causing dogs to go lame. They reside in mossy places – and north-east Manchester is surrounded by mossy places. Legend has it that the Clough behind our temporary home is one such place. It was suggestedly, spookily, shrouded in mist this morning.

Once you start looking for evidence of Boggarts in Manchester, it is surprisingly easy to identify them. Behind a row of recycling bins at the back of Piccadilly station, much moss. In the centre of a concrete block on Old Mill Lane at the heart of the New Islington redevelopment, a deep hole with moss inside. On the brick linings of waterway channels off Alan Turing Way – all manner of mossy shapes and green shades.

By the time we reached the municipal space of Boggart Hole Clough itself we were so convinced of the evidence of prankster spirits throughout the area of East Manchester that we were almost disappointed by the dripping green and gold cutting lined with lightning-struck trees and plastic-bag debris where undoubtedly mischief would easily find a home. But it is an impressive park, especially for the impressionable traveller like ourselves, willing to embrace and enjoy tall tales like that told of the Boggart on the website of the Boggart Hole Clough Brewery.

What did we actually do today? To retrace our steps, we found the Brewery in an industrial unit off Clough Road (a modest plant; a dog-walker who looked like he’d lived around the corner all his life didn’t know it existed, but a car mechanic in a neighbouring unit did), surprised the lady at the door, not used to occasional callers like us, and bought from her a couple of bottles of Sundial (ABV 4.7%, ‘A very pale beer with a refreshing fruity hop taste and aroma’). Prior to that, we enjoyed a generous couple of hot meat barms at J&Js Cafe, two doors down from the God is Great Boutique in Moston, made all the more special by a fruitless trawl around the industrial estates of Miles Platting, where surprisingly no All-Day Breakfast Cafes were to be found.

We had a wondrous twenty minutes with two good folks in the Sportcity Visitor Centre, the perfect people to be in that job, being thoroughly local and steeped in the history of the place. Marvelled at B of the Bang, as every visitor must, as it is a very impressive piece of public art. Noted the subtle social engineering in place along the thoroughfares surrounding Sportcity – railings corraling events visitors along specified approved routes, and detaching local residents from them; and further into town mused on the installation of new pieces of large public art along Old Mill Street, before any buildings had been completed on New Islington – perhaps to install the idea of New Islington into people’s minds, early in the project.

We enjoyed finding cousins of B of the Bang all along our route – a large spiky plant in someone’s garden on Old Mill Street which we named C of the Cactus, an odd piece of public art in North Manchester Business Park strung like a 20ft harp (T of the Twang), some tree-like madness on the top of the empty Thorp Road Factory Shop. And I enjoyed keeping the Boggart connection going as I replayed in my head Paul Rooney’s Lucy Over Lancashire, first blogged about here, an ambitious piece of music in which a Boggart Lucy, explains at some length the connections between Lancashire and the activities of the Dark One. These include the Pendle Witches, Dark Satanic Mills, the Red Devils, The Fall, the slave and cotton trades, Mick Hucknall and, especially the wicked shock-jock Alan Beswick who it turns out is her Master.

There’s a Beswick Street in Ancoats, near where our walk began. And Lucy used to inhabit a pair of old Puma trainers hanging on a telephone wire on a street just off the A666. We saw plenty of old trainers hanging on our route too. Boggarts, Lucy, Beswick… we had plenty of fun finding East Manchester full of them and their ways today. When we got to the B&B and told the landlord we’d been through Boggart Hole Clough park, he raised his eyebrows and said, worriedly, “The Park..?” He didn’t explain his distress at our act of reckless daring, or he’s not saying… but clearly he knows, because he’s learned to live with, the dangers of the Boggart…

Pondering the meaning of Northernness at The Lowry today, on discovering that they’re currently running a major exhibition themed The Myth of the North.

The exhibition is strongly weighted towards the North of L.S. Lowry of course, and artists in turn influenced by him, so there’s lots of mill chimney townscapes and close-ups of clog-wearing children. And also filmmakers (A Taste of Honey etc) and TV dramatists, so lots of Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner. Mostly, then, this is about the ‘North’ of Salford-Manchester – and Blackpool, on which the exhibition ends. Which is ok as far as it goes, and I think I’d agree with one satisfied customer quoted as saying, “The Myth of The North exhibition was … the best exhibition ever done in the Lowry”.

Its two main shortcomings are that it showcases the artists whose signature theme was nostalgia, at the expense of those attempting to express their vision of life in the contemporary north (a couple of Morrisey sleeve covers is not enough), and that its subject matter is almost entirely white. I was struck especially by this as I’ve spent the last couple of weeks walking through very mixed-race mill towns, conscious of the attendant joys and sorrows, and the last couple of days in a very cosmopolitan city (in a B&B run by an Afro-Caribbean family in a black part of town). And this afternoon The Lowry exhibition was hosting a school visit by a class of predominantly black and Asian children. Some of the young girls were excited seeing clips of ancient Corry – but for their value as historical novelties rather than their having anything to say about, or to, their own North-of-the-noughties.

But a strength of the exhibition is in its understanding of the limitations of its artists’ particular perspectives; so it might valuably contribute to useful ongoing dialogues about the particular ways we choose to represent Northernness, to ourselves and to the outside (non-Northern) world (and the ways that the outside world chooses to represent us). At the beginning the exhibition makes clear an accepted critics’ view of Lowry, that his works ‘had little to identify them with the time in which they were painted’. Lowry’s mill townscapes were nostalgic in the 1950s, as the skylines he cherished were vanishing under postwar reconstruction. ‘As the landscape changed, so his interest in painting it dwindled’. Another observation about Lowry is that he always painted his landscapes from an impossible viewpoint – high up, as if hovering above the place: which might suggest something about his detatchment from his subject.

I found these criticisms valuable in helping me to consider my own perspectives on the North which I’m walking and recording, ‘The Myth of The North’ I’m forming by my own prejudicial views of the place. And I was most alerted by this description of the German documentary photographer Bill Brandt who was criticised for ‘wandering about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe.’ Despite this his photographs were very carefully composed, artificially crafted and manipulated pieces, which unveiled the lie about his ‘detachment’. I’m walking the M62 in the hope of having my eyes opened to new things in familiar-looking places; but I must not forget that behind my eyes are a whole lot of preconceptions. Not least here this week in, of all places for a Scouser to be, Manchester…

I left the M62 behind at Castleton and followed the Rochdale Canal all the way to the 91st lock at Castlefield Basin where it meets the Bridgewater Canal. Almost the entire route of this waterway is mill-lined and heavily populated with geese. Besides that, though, many contrasts.

Castleton is a red brick mill town remarkable for St Martin’s Church, which is very noticeable to M62 drivers nearing Junction 20. Close up the church looks even higher and mightier. But with open doors and community facilities advertised, it is seemingly not above, but part of the life of the townsfolk. Castleton’s fields in mid-morning drizzle looked like a warped 21st century version of a John Constable painting: cows, canal, six-lane carriageway at a near-standstill. And Castleton, with terraced views like that along Newchurch Street, looks rather like the opening titles of Corry… I wonder if they like that comparison round there.

At Hollinwood the canal passes under another motorway – the M60 (J22) just by the Trinity Mirror printworks which produced the Manchester Evening News I was later given (free to all within the city centre). From the waterway, silent but for geese and the occasional scurrying rat, I stepped into the madness of lunchtime at Morrisons, walking the length and breadth of the store looking for a Gents and finding it eventually, just inside the main entrance. The man in front of me at the Express Checkout (One Basket Only) had cheated by filling one basket and also purchasing a bucket, which he had also filled with goods. I waited some time before eating my by-now established lunch of Chicken Caesar Wrap and a can of Red Bull; did this underneath a mill chimney in Failsworth now doubling as a mobile phone transmission tower, in the gaze of two men from British Waterways policing their patch from a white van.

These men are monitoring the tow paths because canals – a little hidden, a little shoddy as they wind through cities – do seem to be ideal sites for nefarious activities. More on that shortly. But the Rochdale Canal, Failsworth through Dean Lane section, features a wonderful wide open sweep (just by Tesco Extra car park) with even more geese than elsewhere and then a stretch lined by fairly ordinary-looking homes (not designer villas, but straighforward working people’s residences) whose occupants had extended their gardens to the water, providing the passing observers (me, numerous joggers, Tesco-goers and office girls) with plenty of material for the ‘Don’t Do Decking Like That!’ programmes running in our heads.

The last section – through Manchester city centre, under Piccadilly, under Oxford Road, out to the world of reclaimed warehouses, wildly high viaducts, upmarket bars and complex watercourses which is Castlefield – all of this was a great adventure, a dramatic entrance to a dramatic city. There were some places of real wonder and beauty en-route.

It got a bit sordid passing through tunnels marked with police signs warning against lewd sexual activities, near the city’s otherwise jolly gay village (men in pink tshirts bubbling with conversation at canalside tables). But it had all turned nasty earlier than that, a couple of miles higher up the canal, in what was probably the only incident I’ve had on this journey which provoked fear in me, felt like it could have got very serious indeed. At the canalside in Newton Heath I got caught up in the everyday, if ramshackle, routine of drug-addicted folk.

Before me, walking haphazardly, a man with a pushchair (containing, I think, a small and silent child), a woman, and a man who pulled away as I approached, stumbled across a lock bridge pointing and shouting what may have been threats, or friendly farewells. The woman dropped back as she (and I) noticed ahead of us a group of youths gathered around another bridge. As I passed her I noticed her face; tragically she displayed to me the sure-sign death’s mask of a serious addict. I’ve been joking about ghosts on this journey; just then I think I really saw one. The pushchair man walked on, passed the youths, who began to follow. All except one who was there as I passed the bridge, and we both had to step aside as another man emerged, stumbling, from a hole behind the metal supports under the bridge, brandishing a needle which he’d recently used.

Further on the pushchair man swerved off the towpath into a clearing, and the youths stopped. I had to choose – follow the pushchair man (who may perhaps have been escaping a possible assualt by the gang) or keep on the path thus having to walk through the youths. I walked through the youths, who weren’t interested in me. As I left them behind they were gathering with the man, whose pushchair, I suspect, was probably carrying more than just a small child. A supplier.

If this episode set the heart racing then a less threatening incident in Miles Platting angered me. I met a man who was busily collecting aluminium cans from the canalside detritus. He had plenty – two, going on three, bin bags full. He looked desperate, not deathly. Desperate to find any small source of income to keep himself, maybe a family, in food. In his eyes I saw shame. Seeing him being so bowed and broken – that angered me. Welcome to Manchester, I thought, aware that we’d just passed sight of Sport City, the 2002 Commonwealth Games complex now housing Sven’s Manchester City and various other prestiege venues.

And welcome to Manchester, I thought later as I read the Manchester Evening News report on the growing income divide between the city’s prospering south-west and struggling north-east. ‘The average salary in Tatton (£772) is now nearly twice as high as in Gorton (£403), research shows.’ And Niall Cooper, of Manchester-based Church Action on Poverty , said: “We have a two tier economy. Clearly there is a huge amount of affluence coming into the city, but the other side of that is that it is being sustained by an expanding low-wage service sector. If you talk to families of people working on low incomes, poverty remains a real issue…”

Rochdale prides itself as being the Birthplace of Co-operation, and that really is something to be proud of. The Rochdale Principles, established in 1844 by a pioneering collective of weavers, warpers, woolsorters and warehousemen, remain the basis of co-operative trading today. Though it has been through many changes on its journey through the borderlands of capital the co-operative movement remains vibrant; the International Co-operative Alliance ‘has 222 member organisations from 86 countries active in all sectors of the economy… represent[ing] more than 800 million individuals worldwide.’

My instinct is that if people can learn to trade co-operatively then they can learn to live co-operatively. So I set out to walk Rochdale today looking for signs of co-operation. I found some; because low-level co-operation is everywhere, if you look for it. The older and younger women supporting each other as they struggled down the ramp outside the social security office (unclear which one most needed support, both of them bad on their feet); the smokers outside Rochdale’s public buildings, quietly co-operating with the indoor ban despite their discomfort in the drizzle; drivers pulling up their vehicles to allow pedestrians to cross The Esplanade, wide and spacious beneath the imposing Town Hall; the queuers snaking around the lobby of Natwest. Everyday co-operation.

Co-operation involves cash, so I looked at where the cash flows, in and out of Rochdale, to see what it might reveal. The shopping centres carry the usual multinational stores, Claires Accessories, nail and tanning salons. I noted that like Halifax, its Yorkshire cousin, there are no Starbucks in Rochdale. But Halifax has a Caffe Nero – there’s none here.

Along one block of Yorkshire Street are:
A Shell petrol station
Sahara Grill
Shafi Off-Licence
Chris Paulson Cycles
Noni Jewellers
Chemist – Wm Bamford and Sons (Bamford a famous Rochdale name)
Kismat Chippy and Fast Food Takeaway
Kebabish Oriental (Fast Home Delivery)
TV, Video and Audio Service
(An unmarked shop, peering through net curtains revealed a jewellers)
Watan Cash and Carry (Continental Groceries Halal Meat and Poultry)

Everywhere in this busy end of town are money transfer shops: Western Union, The Money Shop, IQRA International. There are also Cash Converters, Cash Generators, the pawnbrokers doing lively business. And a shop called StreetCred, ‘a savings and loan co-operative serving anyone who lives or works in the Borough, regardless of their status.’

So money moves out of this poor Pennine town into the pockets of global shareholders but also to the overseas relatives of those who eke out their living here. And money moves in small amounts between those selling to raise essential cash, buying-back when some money comes in; and between those who have seen the value in joining a credit union, their savings helping others to take low-interest loans to pay for birthdays, Eid or Christmas.

There is co-operation in all of this; but also conflict. “They’re the problem,” said the 78-year-old lady sitting next to me on a damp seat outside Rochdale Exchange Shopping Centre. “Taking our jobs. If they went home there’d be enough jobs and houses for us.” This woman’s more immediate grief was due to the recent loss of her 54-year old son to lung cancer and the imminent departure of her other son and his family to their new life in Australia. But she had no mind to consider co-operation with her Asian neighbours as a way of rebuilding her life. “What annoys us,” she said, “is that we see them getting these benefits, and they haven’t paid anything in, like we have, do you see what I mean?”

Later, reflecting on her bristling pain, I realised that in speaking that way this doubly-bereaved woman seemed to be affirming one of the principles of co-operation: it’s a membership movement. To get the benefits of co-operation you have to be ‘one of us’. You have to be accepted by ‘us’. Which suggests a deep flaw in co-operation.

Or so I thought until I revisited John Cole’s excellent little book, Conflict & Cooperation, Rochdale and the pioneering spirit. The Rochdale Principles affirm open membership; alongside democracy, equality and political and religious neutrality.

A truly open membership organisation would display a rare and radical generosity. An untarnished commitment to equality and democratic process would enable such an organisation to function. The conflict isn’t in these tried and trusted principles; it’s in whether a townsfolk so torn by recent rapid, debilitating social and economic change might rediscover the confidence to dare to reapply them.

I’m having the sorts of Sundays that other people do. It’s a real healing thing. A nice afternoon stroll around Oakwell Hall; watching old blokes playing George Formby songs (very, very well) outside a pub at the Otley Folk Festival; and today – applauding the Saddleworth Clog and Garland Dancers and mootching about old steam engines at Ellenroad Engine House, Newhey.

This is serious entertainment. When I arrived up in the Engine Room the gent in the suit and tie standing alongside the 3000 horsepower twin-tandem steam engines Victoria and Alexandra was giving an introduction to the few who could hear him over engine hum and steam hiss, and the first words I heard him say were amusingly disparaging ones about ‘The Health and Stupidity Regulations’.

I looked around and, carrying a metal teapot full of oil, preparing to open up a large valve to start the beast of an engine, was a lady in overalls whose long white hair would not have been allowed to flow so freely near any 28ft diameter flywheel in any modern power plant (not that such a dangerous piece of machinery would be anywhere near as exposed or unguarded as the Ellenroad wheel is). Parents sat their babes on railings literally inches from giant metal pistons which would shortly be hammering away at high speed, and haphazardly placed on a table by the entrance sat a very large spanner which might have taken someone’s kneecap off if it had been accidentally knocked to the ground.

SAFETY, says a heading on page three of the four-page Ellenroad guide. This is a working industrial site. There are wet surfaces, slippery slopes, oil and other hazardous substances. Please do not run! Children must be accompanied at all times!

At Ellenroad Engine House, on the first Sunday of each month, you can see the only fully-working cotton mill engine with its original steam-raising plant. You can see volunteers (who are they in everyday life – civil servants? bankers?) stoking coal into giant boilers and loving their faces becoming increasingly blackened. You can feel a scream at the core of your brain as another man starts up the replica aircraft turbine engine he has built (clue for next time: when he prepares to demonstrate his engine he puts on ear protectors). I bet if you got too close to the garland dancers, sidling past to the refreshment table while they were performing, it’d hurt a lot having your toes trodden on by a clog.

It’s not even safe looking at the paper exhibits. For here, another sort of toughness surfaces. The toughness of the mill owners to their workers. Here, evidence that in 1937 ‘learner weavers’ were on five shillings a week (two week’s work would buy you a cuppa at the Ellenroad tea bar today – and that’s cheap). And here, evidence of the shrinking of workers’ holiday allowances in 1952. 144 hours a year; two weeks six days off. And tough work, low-paid, when you were on. No wonder that from time to time in this and nearby textile towns the workers erupted in protest.

I left thrilled and provoked by all this. Bought a bobbin of cotton and a book about the pioneering spirit of Rochdale’s workers. More, I suspect, on that subject, tomorrow.

If Junction 35 (Goole: M18 interchange) looks like a triquetra on the map and on the ground, then Junction 21 resembles an (abeit imperfect) yin yang.

As you will know, in Chinese philosophy yin and yang represent the two primal cosmic forces in the universe. Yin, the moon – all coolness and passivity, and Yang, the sun – force, movement, heat. The Yin Yang symbol represents the idealized harmony of these forces; equilibrium in the universe. When white meets black in Taoism, enlightenment meets ignorance.

Fitting, perhaps, then that the yin yang Junction 21 sits where the two great forces of northern England meet: on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border. Well, for the purposes of this blog they do. The border is actually a couple of miles to the east, and I walked it for some distance today. I left my footmarks on it as it crosses the landscape by the gravel track of the Pennine Way skirting Saddleworth, traversing White Hill, skipping quickly across the A672 (old Manchester to Halifax road), slipping beneath the large radio masts on top of Windy Hill and crossing the M62 on a high narrow bridge just west of J22.

But I like the yin yang thing. I will add it to the melting-pot of random contemplations on this onward journey. Lancs-Yorks: are they so different that one could be described as the cool passive one, the other hot and forceful? One enlightened, the other ignorant? Are their differences unreconcilable or can we find equilibrium in the universe of the great North? And what complications might arise when I follow the motorway and the Mersey into Cheshire?

So I’ll spend the rest of this journey sorting out my yin from my yang. Differences found today:
1. Countryside managed by Yorkshire Water: well-maintained stone walls; United Utilities land in Lancs: blackened walls crumbling apart.
2. Peat bogs above motorway in Lancashire; peat bogs removed to build motorway on firm foundations in Scammonden Yorkshire.
3. Footpath signs: liable to be removed, transposed and generally undermined in Pennine Yorkshire; largely visible, well-defined and present around the reservoirs where I made my first steps into Lancs.
4. Those Yorkshire mill towns I’ve left behind: shining in cleaned-up York Stone; Ogden, Haugh and Newhey: sorry but frankly a little grubby-looking.

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.

Making plans for going over the top.
Making plans for circling Scammonden (gorgeous lake manufactured by motorway builders).
Making plans for visiting farms and farmers (and that amazing sheep island at Booth Hill).
Making plans for pacing the Pennine Way (standing on the footbridge which carries that path across the motorway).
Nearing halfway.

Turning my back on the North Sea – straining my eyes to Atlantic shores.
Stepping up high after weeks on the flat – East Yorkshire seems far behind.
Anticipating the step-down soon, to Manchester’s canals and mills and concert halls.
Merseyside still seems far away.
My feet still holding out.
Weather still keeping kind.

Nearing halfway; plenty to think about.
So a quieter day today.

Today, a lesson in the violence of the motorway; the violence of the ever-speeding traffic thrusting through Junction 23 below Outlane – its noise, the disruption in the air; but also and mainly the violence of its construction. For Outlane is a severed village. Viciously severed. You might sense this if you’re driving eastwards and notice just by the bridge across the junction, a row of houses directly abutting the carriageways’ edge, rising high and sudden above the road. You certainly sense this if you stand where those houses are, for this is New Hey Road, cruelly cut-off at Leeches Hill, a long road out of Huddersfield which has been re-routed to continue across the motorway roundabout but whose original course on the opposite side of the motorway has become another cruelly inflicted dead-end.

In the part of Outlane now parallelling the north of the M62 there’s a hotel called The Old Golf House. Further on there’s evidence of the old clubhouse, and a road running underneath the motorway which is an access route to the course itself. In other words, the motorway runs right through Outlane Golf Course.

Along New Hey Road a new house is being built opposite the Methodist church. It’s in the spooky old churchyard and the new owners have inscribed its name above the arched doorway: THE CRYPT. At the church (articulated wagons tearing past the windows of the beautiful new prayer room) Rob the minister tells me that many Outlane newcomers come because they want a quiet place to live which is convenient for their daily commutes to Leeds or Bradford or Manchester; but they don’t need any amenities because they’re not here in the week. So the Post Office goes without a protest. Meanwhile older folks keep the remnant of community life going – though some move out to areas closer to shops and other places of meeting. I wonder if this pattern will change as the young families grow older, take early retirement and begin to want to move in more local circuits themselves. Maybe then the Post Offices or equivalents will begin to return.

A rich day’s walking, from Lindley with a few folks gathered by Nicki, and some good conversations with folks living on Leeches Hill including an older man, building a new wall in York stone, content to be living alongside one of the nation’s busiest stretches of road. He was even at ease about the prospect of a proposed M62 widening, which would position his house right on the side of the expanded roundabout. Perhaps thinking that he may not be around to see that expansion happen; perhaps content that ninety percent of the view from his home is one of the loveliest anywhere, the motorway a shining shunting distraction from the expanse of ancient green on which it sits.

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.