LISTER LANE CEMETERY, HALIFAX, CALDERDALE, ENGLAND

My gardening gloves at the allotment disintegrated during
the long months of recovery from leukaemia when I could not touch
soil because of the microbes living in it.

I'll begin with apologies. I don't mean to be continually starting and stopping. It just happens. There are so many things to do! I've begun going to my allotment again. I've been fighting a battle with rats in my house. I spend a lot of time picking up litter in my neighbourhood. I take photos and write posts in my head - but never get round to putting them on screen. Be assured, though, that I am not forgetting you.

In my head, I planned a whole series of posts about how the terrain changes as we climb up from the river and canal at the foot of the hill, through the town and up to the moor. I was watching to see when the dandelions opened on the different levels. I was going to tell you but . . . 

Doorstep on 1st June 2021

When it came to June I thought I would take part in the '30 Days Wild' challenge with the Wildlife Trusts. I tidied up outside my front door so I could happily sit on the step to have breakfast on the first day and look around at the plants and creatures which happened to be there. Indeed, I did sit on my doorstep for breakfast that day . . . but got distracted by the adventures of a relative who was trying to get back to England after working in Austria and there are so many hospital appointments to go to and neighbours to chat to and spikey things to be pulled out of wooden floorboards and all sorts of other distractions in daily life that . . . well . . . the days go by . . . and I've not been writing any 'wild' posts for June.

The languages on the notice at the entrance to Lister Lane Cemetery gives you clues
about our neighbourhood - English, Urdu, Bengali and Czech.

However, one thing I did do recently was to visit Lister Lane Cemetery on 31st May when it was awash with aquilegia. 

Lister Lane Cemetery awash with aquilegia, May 31st 2021 

Every year it is awash with something . . . poppies, evening primrose, foxgloves . . . something striking and everywhere. This year, it's aquilegia.

The chapel no longer has a roof. Instead, it has bee hives!

In other years I've peered through the gates but only once before have I been in. On that occasion one of the interesting things about it was that there was a set of stocks - the old kind of punishment where people were fixed between planks of wood at their wrists and at their ankles so anyone who felt like it could throw rubbish at them - old fruit and stuff. I doubt the Friends of Lister Lane Cemetery who look after it nowadays had really been having fun at the expense of their less popular neighbours but it was a surprising piece of 'street furniture' to come across all the same!

Lister Lane Cemetery in Halifax was opened in 1841 as a commercial enterprise. As someone who grew up familiar with Church of England country churchyards the idea of a burial place as a money-making scheme came as something of a surprise. But the conventional churchyards of the town at the time were jam-packed and lives were short and some people were unwelcome in the religious graveyards even in death and they were found places in Lister Lane - people who committed suicide, people of different denominations. 

I am struck forcefully by how closely
many of the graves are packed together. Just enough space
for these flowers to grow between.

Forget-me-nots between paving stones in a wide
walkway leading to the chapel ruins.

The soot on the obelisks, the way the graves are crammed together, the stories told in the engravings . . . the cemetery still says something about what life was like here in the nineteenth century - dark, crowded, brief, rich with experience. 

All sorts of people were rammed in, wealthy and poor, with crisply cut, durable gravestones and obelisks, walkways for the living, a sense of welcome and peace and now, thanks to the those who tend it, the graves are covered in flowers. Even the paths have flowers sprouting out of them. It's one of the wonderful things about the 'Calderdale Style'. Even in local parks there's a relaxing and admirable mixture between the formal and informal, the cultivated and the wild.

I'm hoping you will like it here as much as I do for we will be returning!

Ivy-leafed Toadflax on steps at the cemetery.

The last burial at Lister Lane was in 1963 - when the mills were still belching out smoke. 

The other day a neighbour described coming home from work on a bus in a smog of the 1960s. The smog was so thick the driver couldn't see where he was going. The conductor had to get out and walk a couple of feet ahead - and beckon to show it was safe for the bus to move forward. We now live in different times. The air has cleared, the skies are often blue (and there is less snow).

California poppies and Aquilegia.

There's an open day every year on 4th July - with guided tours of the cemetery. If you are in the area you might like to take part. Here's a link.

And you might also like to follow the twitter account of The Friends of Lister Lane Cemetery where the graves are listed over time and the lives of the people who lie there narrated.

__________

Description of Halifax 1810 - 1850 on 'From Weaver to Web' 

(An Online Visual Archive of Calderdale History)

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30 DAYS WILD : 27 - THE WILD SIDE OF TOWN

E Mill, Dean Clough. The mills at Dean Clough were built over time.
E Mill was built in 1857

I invite you to draw an equilateral triangle with its base parallel to the bottom of the page. Put an X part way along its right hand side. Now, from the bottom right hand corner of the triangle draw a vertical line of about the same length at a right angle to the base. You are creating a not-to-scale diagrammatic map of the area I've been covering in recent weeks for Loose and Leafy. Doing it this way is in the tradition of the London Underground Map. It doesn't precisely show what things are like 'on the ground', you couldn't use it easily in order to walk from A to B, but it sets things enough in relation to each other they can take a place in your mind. 

Roses and coronavirus street plants at an entrance to
Dean Clough, Halifax, Calderdale, England.
June 27th 2020

The base of the square is the town centre. The apex is Warley Moor where we saw the meadow pippit (or lark), the Large Heath Butterflies and the Hare's Tail Cottongrass. Going down the left hand side we are descending into the Luddenden Valley - where we walked in the woods and looked along the stream by a bridge. The Tale of Three Levels noted some of the changes in the terrain in between.

Roses and coronavirus street plants at an entrance to
Dean Clough, Halifax, Calderdale, England.
June 27th 2020

The X is where I live and the vertical line is the Hebble Valley which is so steeply sided in places I think of it as a ravine. Where it meets the base of the triangle there's a huge, renovated mill complex called Dean Clough, which was once one of the largest carpet factories in the world and is now converted into offices, art galleries, a theatre and restaurants. In its hey day,  Crossley Carpets employed 5,000 people - the majority of them there. (According to Wikipedia this number was reached in 1900 after nearly a hundred years of manufacturing. According to the 'Let's Look Again' site it didn't reach this number till 1923.) Now, around 4,000 people work in the replacement industries. Or, rather, they do usually. There's a pandemic and the car parks are empty. And this week, because of the rain there are few people wandering around at random. Perfect for my first foray into 'town' for months.

To be blunt, the contents of Dean Clough are not as exciting as they sound on paper (though they could be!) but unlike the residential areas high on the banks either side, it is usually pretty well manicured. The coronovirus is 'seeing to' that and plants are on their way in, springing up between the stone paving slabs in front of the rose beds at one of the access points on the west side.

Nettle growing through cobbles in street. Halifax, England. June 27th 2020.

Walking through Dean Clough is not only to dip into the combined history of the area and the hopes for a Halifax 'on the rise', it's very good for leg muscles. You go down lots of steps to the buildings, then can climb even more on the other side of the valley to reach the park by the Bankfield Museum in Boothtown via a steep cobbled street which is unkempt at the best of times. But with less traffic and fewer pedestrians, plants here are beginning to get even more of a hold than usual. Nettles are one thing 

. . . the tomato plant was a surprise!

It's a little disconcerting. A bit 'end-of-the-world-ish'.

An extraneous fact: 

during the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester (1819) many escaped injury or death because the horses of the Manchester Yeomanry couldn't managed the slippery cobbles of the steep streets in the rain. Manchester is nearly 60 miles away but I think of Peterloo as well as the mill workers in their clogs when I am walking these kinds of streets here. I am amazed the clogs gripped.

LINKS

Dean Clough on Wikipedia

Crossley Carpets on 'Lets Look Again'

Hebble Brook on Wikipedia

Bankfield Museum

Peterloo Massacre on Wikipedia

Manchester Yeomanry on Wikipedia

British Clogs on Wikipedia

Wearing Clogs in Yorkshire in the 1920s on the Bancrofts from Yorkshire Blog

Buying clogs in Calderdale now - the Walkly Clogs site.

   

This post is for Day 27 of the '30 Days Wild' challenge organised by the Wildlife Trusts.

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WILD FLOWERS IN HALIFAX

When I first visited Halifax - looking to see if it would be a good place to live - I was struck by the amount of ragwort. It sprouted out of pavements and walls and old chimneys and public planters. In particular there was a long embankment of it between a car park and part of the busy road system that skirts the quieter and partly pedestrianised town centre. I can't remember what was on this embankment last year but it wasn't ragwort. Earlier this year it was a yellow sea of oil-seed rape flowers. I assumed this was random. Who plants ragwort? Who sows oil-seed rape apart from farmers?

There's loads of ragwort around town this year too. . . but the bank is currently like this. Someone, surely, has turned it into a wildflower oasis - and bees are loving it. So am I. So, I guess, are the hundreds of people who walk past and maybe the thousands of people who drive by in cars and lorries or who look out from buses.

A health update:

Two possible bone marrow / stem cell donors have been identified so I am hoping to return to hospital for a transplant some time in the first part of July. Chemo has knocked back the leukaemia so I am feeling remarkably well but an underlying mutant something or other called FLT3 (I really don't understand what this is) is getting worse - so there's a bit of a race on. A drugs company is allowing me to take a medicine that is not yet on general release to help keep it at bay while I wait to return to hospital. What a weird and surreal life. It's very hard to realise all this frightening stuff really is happening.

In the meantime . . . I try to take up the reins of ordinary life. I wish I enjoyed housework! And I wish the beautiful grasses which have invaded my allotment weren't so tough, luxuriant and profuse. I have some very little tomato seedlings, runner bean plants and patti-pan squashes in pots. Radishes have germinated on the plot but not yet carrots. I mean, they should have but I've sown everything late. It will be nice when the weather becomes appropriate to June. Then though I will probably complain it's too hot!

Thank you whoever is in charge of this bank. Halifax, it turns out, really is a very good place to live.

(Can someone say what the white daisy flowers are? I wondered chamomile but that doesn't seem quite right. And what is the purple flower in the second to last photo?)

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SHROGGS

View from Shrogg's Park across a 'ravine'.
Until I looked at this scene I didn't properly appreciate the light and airiness
of silver birches.

Halifax is full of Victorians. All in a rush they filled the area with houses and mills. Then they went away again. In other words, they died. Or more particularly, Queen Victoria did. There's a statue of her husband Albert, and a promenade which keeps his name. But it's the ghosts of the local wealthy who hang around the place. Not with white sheets over their heads going 'ooooh' but in the landscape.

A short while back I posted about The People's Park in Halifax. (A Parade of Bare Bottoms.) Today we are crossing a wooded ravine (I expect there's a proper name for the steep, deep gullies which go right into the heart of town but 'ravine' will do) to another park - Shroggs.

Until I began this post, I'd assumed there had been a 'Mr Shroggs' and that he'd given the land for the benefit of 'the people' just as Mr Crossley gave land for The People's Park. But no. It turns out that 'shroggs' means 'scrubland' or 'brushwood' or 'area of stunted trees'.

Woodland walk in Shroggs Park, Halifax.
To the right there is an almost sheer drop to a busy main road.

Victorians liked shrubberies and stumperries and rockscapes. I've always assumed it was just one of those things. A fashion that came and went. But perhaps it was more to do with Victorian practicality. Presented with an area of stunted trees and rocky outcrops, one might as well take advantage of what's already there and enjoy the drama. Sling in some formal beds and wide walks and a drinking fountain, perhaps a band. Et voila! An enjoyable mish-mash of the contrived and the wild! Victorian furniture sometimes has mirrors in odd places. This wasn't so people had to crouch down to pluck their eyebrows. It was a way to brighten the atmosphere. Victorians liked tinkering. Sometimes they over-did it. Never mind the age of a church, bung down a regular pattern of tiles in the nave. But they weren't frightened of big projects. Find an area of unproductive ground, plant 60,000 trees and shrubs to give shelter and make it pleasant, put up some impressive gates to give access and open it to the public every day of the year!  Take what is, pitch in and make it 'better'. They were truly 'hands on'.

One of the wide walks in Shroggs Park, Halifax.
There are also formal flower beds and a mass of cocuses in some areas of grass.
(February 20th 2018)

Yesterday, someone compared Halifax to Luxembourg. 'It's a similar topography with ravines splitting the town. But in Luxembourg they've kept the rivers above ground and made it all beautiful.' Having looked at some pictures of Luxembourg, I can see what he means. Some day I'll have to check up on why the rivers in Halifax have largely been channelled into narrow spaces, out of the way places and underground. In the meantime I'll guess it was to prevent flooding, to reduce the amount of soggy ground and maybe (perhaps even primarily) to use the water for power. (I should probably have found out before embarking on this post but if I waited to know everything I'd never say anything - which would not be good.)

Twisted trees on the steep bank at the side of one of the paths.

But in 1872 one Colonel Ackroyd decided to give the people of Halifax a park. What's fun about this is that whereas The People's Park was a place to contemplate ancient statues and walk around quietly, Colonel Ackroyd decreed that in 'his' park people were to play games and music as well as walk along its broad paths, drink at its water fountain, admire its formal beds and sit between its trees. If you take a look at Historic England's site you'll see his intention right from the beginning was that there should be provision for 'cricket, bowls, archery and other games'. (You can now add football and a children's play area. I don't know about archery!)

In making this comparison, there's an awkward gap. The People's Park was designed in 1857 and Shroggs in 1872. But if I were a fiction writer I'd make Crossley and Ackroyd proper contemporaries so I could write a block busting novel about their contrasting approaches. One (Crossley) going for the working man's quiet contemplation and education (the classical statues) and the other (Ackroyd) consciously providing space for games and flirtation (what other use for a shrubbery?). It would be followed by a television drama which, spread over several episodes, would be as successful as Downton Abbey and make my fortune.

Looking down on part of the complex road network from a hill opposite the park.
If you click the picture it will enlarge and you will be able to see how roads are
weaving over and under each other and how cars are coming in and out at
different levels. 

There are no modern-day local-benefactors on this scale. But here's something interesting about Calderdale Council which is currently resisting the amount of new housing the government wants for this area.

According to our local paper (The Halifax Chronicle) the leader of the council (Tim Swift - Labour) says the special topography of the area has to be taken into account. (There are, after all, what I call 'ravines' as well as slopes so steep we might as well call them cliffs - that's me doing that explanation, not a quote from the article). And Councillor Dan Sutherland (also Labour) says "We need to strike the right balance between providing enough housing for the future and both maintaining and improving access to the green spaces we all enjoy."

As you can see from the picture, roads go over and under each other in order to connect the multiple layers of industry and housing in Halifax. (Shroggs Park is above the upper top left of the picture). Given that some areas of town are highly populated . . . a park here and there is no bad thing.

Victorian men like Crossley, Ackroyd and Saville (who in 1866 gave a large area of land to the council on condition it did something about smoke pollution) used some of their wealth to create parks. I used to think if I were truly rich I'd put up clocks all over the country. I've now switched to grants for repairing roofs in Halifax. (In my dreams!)

If you had oodles of money to give away for the public good, how would you spend it?

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HEADING FOR OGDEN WATER

On my other blog, Message in a Milk Bottle, I've posted photos from time to time of a little of the countryside within reach of Halifax.

So you may already have seen a view from Jerusalem Farm

or from Burnsall in Wharfedale

or caught sight of the beautiful bowling greens in Todmorden with hills beyond; not that bowling greens are exactly countryside!

But on this blog, Loose and Leafy in Halifax, I've so far concentrated on the town itself; for that is my immediate context - home. Perhaps now I should widen the field and introduce you to more of the wonderful and very varied countryside near at hand.

We're heading for the green deep in  a fold between the fields and moorland.

And as I do, I should also point you to Everyday Life. Lyn has been writing and posting photos about this part of England since 2009 and has been warming my heart to it ever since I first came across her blog. Our experiences and approach are very different and the reasons I moved to Halifax are broadly based on money, culture, work opportunities and a need for change. The choice of Halifax specifically was largely down to chance. So arriving here is pretty random. However the strong images of some of the country walks she has introduced us to over the years have been nudging away at me. "Cor," I've been thinking, "that's not an 'arf bad place to live!" Blogs have a lot to answer for!

In previous posts I've mentioned the Greek Village books of Sara Alexi. There are masses of them and in the same way as we have moved from Dorset to Halifax, people in the village don't necessarily stay put. In the first book (The Illegal Gardener) one of the main characters is Aaman from Pakistan who finds work re-shaping an English woman's newly acquired garden. Later, in 'Saving Septic Cyril' he and his wife travel (legally, this time) from Pakistan to England where they rent a house in a tiny village near Bradford.

Bradford is quite near Halifax. Indeed, they are linked vaguely by a sequence of fields and villages; and between the two we can look down the hill . . . beyond the sheep . .  not to to where Aaman and Saabira live (for their place is much smaller) . . . but to a village which makes me think of them. (Saabira and Aaaman are, by the way, in my mind, perfectly real people.) 

Through the village and a bit further . . . Ogden water. A fifteen minute drive from my house. What can I say in a short post? That we walked round the reservoir. That when we go back, you can come too.

(Quite a large stretch of water along the right-hand shore was frozen.)

Wherever I live, wherever I go, there are places where I like to be alone; I feel almost possessive about their isolation.

And there are places where there are so many people I can't cope and want to go home.

But here - it was such a jolly atmosphere I felt swept up in the happiness; masses of people walking beside the water before or after their Sunday lunch - and the woods ringing with laughter. There were people of all ages, little children, parents, older people; and teenage boys who were putting great efforts into shuffling awkwardly round slushy patches so they didn't get their flash trainers spoiled in the mud: people bringing Christmas trees to be re-planted or turned into dead-hedge wind-breaks. And, hurray, hurray, no cyclists! I've nearly lost friends over this cyclist issue. As a pedestrian I've had bad experiences with cyclists both in Dorset and in London. I have only one recurring nightmare and that's of hoards of cyclists bearing down on me waving their arms and shouting. It's horrible.

I've always liked the look of wind turbines - but am not yet entirely convinced they are the way forward. Having complained about cyclists I'll try not to raise your hackles further by worrying about their proliferation. Hopefully they are nothing but an early stage in the development of 'green' power and with any luck won't last long. But against a dark sky they are pretty impressive don't you think?

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A PARADE OF BARE BOTTOMS

I don't much like parks. They are too much nature tamed. They have walks without purpose and flow with an atmosphere of worthiness, municipal community and alone-nes. They are uncomfortable places.

I don't much like flatness. I once stayed a week in Huntingdonshire in an area that was counted as 'semi-desert'; not because it was dry but because so few people lived there. To ride on a bus you needed to phone in advance and ask the driver to collect you; and you could see everything for miles and miles.There was no-where to hide. There were, I suppose, advantages to this flatness. For instance I could so easily see a storm coming in advance of its arrival there was time to get home before it began to rain. I'd rather have sheltered under a hedge though - if there had been hedges. But there were none. Just miles of visibility.

Hills are tiring to walk in but because you can't see everything at once there's more to see. Constant surprise. What's over the brow? What's around the bend?

* * *

Venus

Scotland has a new five pound note. I heard about it by chance on 'Woman's Hour' this morning.* It has a portrait of Nan Shepherd on it. I'd not heard of her before and know little about her still - but the interviewee on Woman's Hour read a bit of something she'd written; comments on how you can see static things 'move' merely by shifting the angle of your head, your eye, your body. Turn upside down.

* * *

Last week I visited The People's Park in Halifax. I'd been there a few times before. It's growing on me - but on my first visit I decided it's exactly the kind of park I don't like; more or less flat with a fountain that's never turned on and a short, stagnant 'serpentine' stretch of water with a grassy bank in the middle so ducks have to come out on one side and up-and-over if they want to swim its full length.

According to the Wikipedia entry, Francis Crossley - the man who established this park - was so impressed by the scenery of New England he returned to Halifax eager "to arrange art and nature so that they shall be within the walk of every working man in Halifax; that he shall go to take his stroll there after he has done his hard day's toil, and be able to get home without being tired".

The idea that everyone in Halifax would be able to walk there for a stroll after a hard day's work is a bit of a far hope as it's not in the centre and it is up a hill - but it had already begun to strike me (as I softened towards it) that in a town as hilly as Halifax a flat space to walk in might have been a luxury after a day working hard for Francis Crossley and his relations.

I don't think he and I would have got along. I may well say more about his attitude towards workers in another post but even on lesser things we'd probably have irritated and puzzled each other. Why did the White Mountains of New Hampshire inspire him to provide Halifax with a large area of flat grass? (I don't want to under-rate him - there were trees and plants too - but you get the jist.)

Historic England's entry about The People's Park says it 'It provided for quiet enjoyment of the scenery and for walking, and all meetings, games and dancing were forbidden.' (Oh joy!) Lots of games in the summer now though, and a children's playground.

Telemachus
who has not put on his armour
but has propped it against his left buttock instead.

When the park was opened in 1857, a troupe of copied statues was brought in: Hercules, Venus, Diana, Telemachus and Sophocles. (Apollo arrived broken.) I don't know why visitors would want to see a load of semi-naked men on pedestals while they were walking quietly round the paths after a heavy day at Crossley's carpet mill . . . and I don't know why these giants of mythology and Greek and Roman religion never got the hang of getting dressed. And the extra surprising thing about the arrangement of these statues is that when walking along the broad path beside them one is presented with a selection of bare bottoms. 

Slowly we return to Nan Shepherd . . .

Hercules looking strongish because the colours are deep in the photo.

The idea that things look different from different angles is basic to the kind of photographs I take. It's easy to say and perfectly obvious to all but not always acted upon or taken seriously or even noticed. Different lights send different messages. Different directions bring out different strengths and different weaknesses; and different colours and different lichens. Photographs of ancient and Victorian statues tend not to explore this too much except by chance. Each statue is left to say it's own thing - which is more or less 'look at me, I'm on a postcard'.

Hercules looking as if he's dropped his bath robe
and is stooping to catch it  - because the colours are weaker.
(Actually he's leaning on a club over which is draped the skin of the Nemean Lion.)

Hence the range of Hercules photos here - rear view and from different angles. I'm not sure what he's holding behind his back but suspect it's apples he's stolen from the garden guarded by the Hesperides. (Briefly, I thought of explaining this but got bogged down and bored . . . perhaps they are not apples but oranges? Who cares?)

Hercules looking looking like a teacher who has confiscated a yo-yo.
My viewpoint here perhaps influenced by having experience
of overbearing teachers but none of  apple-scrumping heroes.

Francis Crossley would not have liked me. Definitely not. Nor do I think I would have liked him. I imagine he'd be disappointed to know I don't appreciate these statues in the way he probably intended. He might even be cross. And I doubt he would have been pleased to see me hurrying up and down laughing and taking photos. (Though he might have been interested in examining a digital camera before anyone else of his age.)

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A LITTLE POST OF COMPARISONS

Every day I'm here in Halifax, my affection for it grows and I'm glad for the move.

It's different.

Yes.

Definitely different from Dorset. But that was the point - to seek something new.

Recently, though, I had to go back south to take final readings on the gas, water and electricity meters and to hand back keys to the house.

This might have been painful. I might have had a crisis. I might have changed my mind. I might have decided I didn't want to live in Yorkshire after all. Disaster! But I didn't. I wanted to blow my life in Dorset aside like a dandelion clock. Done.

Rather than sleep in my old house void of furniture carpet lifted etc. etc. . . . I lived in a tent. There were ground level plants everywhere.

And so there are in Halifax! It's just that I'll have to pay more attention!

Summer in Dorset is full of colour.

And in Halifax too.

I'm here.

(The performers in the top photo are part of Circus Raj - one of the re-opening events at The Halifax Piece Hall.)

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