March 23, 2019
Day One
Rochdale to Gargrave
Bike loaded, I was out of the door for the 08:15 train at my local station. One hour later I hopped off at Rochdale, and was soon climbing out of town between rows of Victorian terraced houses towards Rooley Moor. My first objective was the Rooley Moor Road, often referred to as the Cotton Famine Road.
Leading north across high, lonely ground, this cobbled road was built in the early 1860s by impoverished Rochdale cotton weavers. The US Civil War had led to a shortage of cotton imports, and this was one of the public works projects set in motion to provide gainful employment and reduce hardship amongst the local workforce. Rather than regurgitate other website's words in this journal, I'll direct you to useful sources, thus: the Cotton Famine Road.
These days the moor is a quiet, peaceful place, but there was enough traffic in the Victorian era to sustain a travellers' inn called The Moorcock. The two upright pillars and jumbled stones in the picture above are all that remain of it, fading back into the grass and heather. But the road's still there, largely intact 150 years after it was built, and makes a great ride up over the 500m contour towards the Rossendale Valley.
As you crest the summit, the nature of the road changes and you start to get a sense of the source of the traffic and commerce. The track merges from cobblestones into one of parallel rows of large flagstones with grooves worn down the middle. Rounding the hill above Rossendale, you can see where great chunks were taken out of the landscape by a now defunct quarrying industry; the paving stones were worn down over the decades by large carts taking the dressed sandstone to the mainline rail network in the valleys for national distribution.
| Heart | 3 | Comment | 0 | Link |
Again, it's now a quiet place, just the wind and the skylarks, but up until WWI it was a scene of thriving industry: cranes, watermills, steam engines, stone cutting and grinding machinery, even narrow gauge tramways to get the stone down the hillside to the waiting trains.
The Valley of Stone website is a good source of information about the history of these quarries.
I rode out west along one of these tramways, then turned north away from the shallow incline and plunged into Waterfoot for a refuelling session.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
The deep incised valleys here are filled with densely packed Victorian-era terraced houses, straggling out up the hillsides into isolated hamlets and farm buildings. For much of this first day, I was following the Pennine Bridleway, a c.330km trail that stretches from Derbyshire up into Cumbria. I'm not usually a fan of toddling along other people's routes, but they've done a great job on this one: linking up and waymarking existing packhorse tracks and bridleways, and creating new paths where necessary. The signposting is good without being obtrusive, and I made rapid progress north through to the empty moorland rising east above Burnley – Bronte country...
Dropping down the rough lane towards the reservoirs cut into Worsthorne Moor, you can't help noticing the landscape looks a little...odd. The ground is covered in lumps, knolls and what appear to be dry drainage channels, but all covered in grass with no water present. It's clearly not a 'natural' landscape, even if it has reverted back to nature.
Once again, I was passing through a landscape ravaged by industry, principally in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. In this case, the increasing demands of construction and agriculture required large volumes of quicklime, but the local bedrock was sandstone rather than the limestone needed to make it. However, large quantites of limestone had been scooped up by Quaternary ice sheets from what is now the Yorkshire Dales, brought south and dumped in this area. Only one problem: the limestone was mixed in with clay, silt and gravel. Rather than mess about digging out the rock, the softer sediments were simply washed away by a process called 'hushing.' Put simply, local streams were dammed above the desired deposits until a head of water built up. Once the pond was big enough, the dam would be breached so the water washed away the softer silt and gravel, leaving the limestone exposed. This would then be burnt with peat dug out of the moor to make the quicklime. It was a localised environmental catastrophe!
We'll come back to hushing later in the trip, but for now I continued round the edges of the moors above the Ribble Valley, riding first well drained stony singletrack then, later, old packhorse trails and rocky lanes through to the hamlet of Wycoller.
| Heart | 4 | Comment | 1 | Link |
Wycoller is a bit of a tourist trap now, but it's a good example of how changing economic conditions in the early Nineteenth Century affected the way this land was populated and worked. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the pattern had been one of small villages and farms scattered over the high ground, with individuals weaving wool and cotton to supplement their meagre incomes. The raw materials and finished cloth were transported around via a network of narrow, paved packhorse trails that connected up these isolated settlements. The coming of the canals and railways changed all that; textile weaving became centralised in the valleys, the villages abandoned as people moved to the towns in search of work. And the packhorse trails fell into disuse - but they're still there, waiting to be ridden on a bicycle...
| Heart | 2 | Comment | 0 | Link |
More on packhorse trails later in the journal, but this was the point I left the Pennine Bridleway. I'd been riding almost entirely offroad up until this point, but now had to briefly follow minor tarmac lanes to the town of Foulridge – which is where I hit the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
The 204km L&LC was built across the Pennines between 1770 and 1816. Construction took place in phases as proponents of different routes wrangled over which option was best, and the US War of Independence and Napoleonic Wars periodically sucked investment elsewhere. Unlike many UK canals, the L&LC remained open for freight right up until the 1980s; due to its greater width and large locks, it was able to compete with the Nineteenth Century railways that shut down many earlier canals.
One rationale for this part of the canal's route was that the Sheddon Hushings simply didn't provide enough limestone for the increasing needs of local construction, textiles and agriculture. Merchants invested in the canal because they wanted to use it to bring limestone down from my next destination, the Yorkshire Dales. This trade led to the demise of the Sheddon Clough industry, and also contributed to the changing demographics of the textile industry: it was possible to move larger quantities of raw materials and finished cloth around, and bring in the coal required for the steam engines that powered large mills in valley towns like Burnley, Blackburn and Barnoldswick.
Having passed through sites that'd fallen into disuse as a result of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, I now planned to use its towpath as an easy traffic-free route to my destination for the evening, Gargrave. See what I did there? It's almost like I planned this trip...
I actually grew up in a seaside town about five miles away from the L&LC's more western spur, and it was in fact the venue for my first ever unsupervised bike tour. Me and a friend called Ste rode the round trip to the canal and back on our five speed racers in the late 1970s, when we were about 10 years old. If parents let their kids do that now they'd probably have them taken away by Social Services, but I remember it being a fantastic adventure. The L&LC was conceived as being one of the lines of defence in the event of a Nazi invasion during WWII, and I recall poking around in abandoned concrete machine gun emplacements with great interest.
| Heart | 1 | Comment | 0 | Link |
No such dramas on this occasion, though, and it was an easy, broadly downhill spin along the canal right up to the little campsite in Gargrave. Tent pitched, then it was round to The Frying Yorkshireman for the Best Fish'n'Chips in England (FACT)!
Height gain: 1265m/4150ft
Today's ride: 74 km (46 miles)
Total: 74 km (46 miles)
| Rate this entry's writing | Heart | 6 |
| Comment on this entry | Comment | 0 |