Eighteenth-Century Roads West of Settle

A group of nineteen, members of NCHT and others, set out from Giggleswick Station car park in glorious sunshine to find evidence of the eighteenth-century roads on the hillsides above. The walk visited three of the roads shown on Jefferys map of Yorkshire, surveyed in the 1760s, none of which coincides with the modern motor roads. (See NCHT Journal 2013, pp 25 - 28).

Before progressing into the eighteenth century, the group explored a little of the medieval landscape. Passing the door of Swawbeck, we were welcomed by its owner, Roger Moss, who explained a little of its history and its likely identity as Cocket Lodge with medieval origins. He warmly invited visitors to return and tour the house at a later date. This introduced a secondary theme of the day’s walk, being the Giggleswick Lodges - Cocket, Grainhouse, Rome, Fieldgate, Close House, Paley Green, Craven Ridge and Armistead. In the Middle Ages abbeys and large land-owners such as the Percys and the Cliffords managed their vast estates with a series of lodges or farmsteads scattered across a large area, many of which still exist. We saw seven of the lodge locations, and also the head of an old road that would have led us to three more. We moved on through Sunny Meadow, a key feature of Tony Stephens’ reasoning about the identity of Cocket Lodge, and reached Cocket Lane. (See Tony Stephens’ Landscapes and Townscapes of North Craven. Long Preston: Long Preston Heritage Group, 2011). This most obvious of old roads was not shown by Jefferys, suggesting that it was already out of use in the eighteenth century.

This brought us to our first example of a Jefferys road, the line of which we could see rising up left towards the former managed rabbit warren of Coney Garth. We descended right, seeing it first as holloways in the field, then a walled green lane. Finally it joined the modern road to Rome and Wham, crossing what was probably the causeway described in Brayshaw’s History of the Ancient Parish of Giggleswick. Heading up past Rome we walked parallel to the multiple holloways of a second road, seeing where gaps in walls had closed, where the old road met the new to cross a deep-cut stream bed, and finally where the old and new roads became one in a deep holloway. Our highest point was at the head of Parson’s Close Lane, one of the Jefferys roads that has virtually gone out of use but remains a clear feature of the landscape as it zig-zags down to Tipperthwaite via Craven Ridge.

Returning downhill we diverted across the footpath to Fieldgate, rising and falling as we crossed the holloways before descending to cross the stream. This illustrated one of the difficulties of interpreting the Jefferys map, as there was good evidence to suggest that either of two routes was the road he showed.

We returned to Giggleswick in continuing sunshine, with several of the group commenting that they had discovered a delightful new area of countryside as well as evidence of the old roads.