Jumble Hole Clough

Some years ago, Adele and I on a grand day out from Blackpool ventured across the old county line between Lancashire and Yorkshire. That boundary ran along Jumble Hole Clough, a steep-sided wooded valley formed by a fast-flowing stream that eventually discharged into the River Calder.

In the 19th century (actually from the late 1700s onwards) through to the early 20th century, the steep-sided valleys of the Upper Calder area were home to a series of mills that harnessed the power of fast-flowing streams to turn water-wheels that produced the power to drive spinning and weaving machines of the Industrial Revolution.

One of the earliest was built at Mytholmroyd by Thomas Edmondson, its scribbling and carding machines being water-powered and its spinning frames worked by young women and girls. Other mills soon followed across the region, financed by wealthy merchant-manufacturers. Eventually hundreds of mills were in place across Calderdale, spinning, dyeing, knitting, stitching and weaving wool, cotton and silk with practised excellence into cloth, bedding and carpets. The opening of the Rochdale canal in 1796 and the building of a branch of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway through the Calder Valley in 1841, provided excellent transport links for the mills to bring materials in and ship product out to the world.

Jumble Hole Clough, focus of today's blog, lies to the west of Hebden Bridge and Charlestown. By the early 19th century it was a thriving industrial centre with four large mills: Staups (originally Starlings) Mill, Cow Bridge Mill, Spa Mill and Jumble Hole Mill itself.

Staups Mill was apparently the earliest of the four, built. It was a cotton mill with two 'mules' with two hundred and sixteen spindles on each (a comparatively small operation), spinning calico for the most part. It appears to have changed ownership several times during the 19th century.

"Brave dreams and their mortgaged walls are let rot in the rain."

Cow Bridge Mill was a three storey mill built over the stream and an artificial waterfall created to divert the stream into a mill dam. It was accompanied by a row of cottages providing accommodation for the mill workers. Originally a cotton-spinning mill, it changed to worsted production in the 1830s. When it finally closed down near the end of that century, the looms were relocated to more modern premises elsewhere.

Spa Mill was a much bigger five-storey cotton mill built around 1788. It was powered by an overshot water wheel from a dam above the mill. It was said to have specialised in fustian, a tough cotton cloth used mainly in men's clothing (jackets and trousers). 

Jumble Hole Mill is the only one of the four still in existence. Today it is used as private residences and workshops. It was originally called Underbank dyeworks and was particularly used for dying silk, having two dye sheds. It was partially destroyed by fire in 1899 but was rebuilt and survived in use until the 1950s under the ownership of Cocker and Co. Ltd. "bleaching, dyeing and finishing of blacks and colours; rayons; pongees; crepes; repps; cashmeres; brocades; honeycombes; mercerised stripes, muslins; lenos; doria shapes. Underbank Dyeworks, steam, tel TN 207. T.A.Cocker Mng director; Mabel townsend Secretary". The remains of the mill dam which was fed by a goit from Jumble Hole Clough, can still be seen above the mill.

Of course, as is the way of the world, increased mechanisation, the growth of industrialisation and much cheaper labour in other parts of the world in the 20th century eventually meant that the mills of Calderdale were no longer viable concerns. Gradually they all closed down.

In the last hundred years the abandoned workplaces have fallen into ruin (as the photograph of what remains of Staups Mill above shows), and trees and wildlife have reclaimed the steep-sided valleys. A once bustling area full of noise, smoke and human activity, is now a green and pleasant habitat filled with birdsong and the sound of rushing water, a paradise for hikers, dog-walkers and nature lovers. 

Only a couple of examples of the area's industrial heritage remain, preserved as museums, and those fast-flowing streams with their occasional mill pools and weirs.

"Happiness is now broken water at the bottom of a precipice."

It's Ted Hughes country, of course. He was born at Mytholmroyd, midway between Heptonstall and Jumble Hole Clough and to the west of Hebden Bridge. His parents had a house at Slack, near Heptonstall, and Sylvia Plath is buried in Heptonstall churchyard.

If you're intimately familiar with the poetry of Ted Hughes, you'll know that he wrote a collection of poems in the late 1970s about that region of West Yorkshire that was his backyard when he was growing up. I quote his preface to that volume here, along with the titular poem from the collection, as it reminds me of our fascinating walks in Calderdale that day.

"The Calder valley, west of Halifax, was the last ditch of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the Angles. For centuries it was considered a more of less uninhabitable wilderness, a notorious refuge for criminals, a hide-out for refugees. Then in the 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution in textiles, and the upper Calder became 'the hardest worked river in England'.

Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills of the region and their attendant chapels die. Within the last fifteen years the end has come. They are now virtually dead, and the population of the valley and the hillsides, so rooted for so long, is changing rapidly."

Remains Of Elmet

Death-struggle of the glacier

Enlarged the long gullet of Calder

Down which its corpse vanished.

Farms came, stony masticators

Of generations that ate each other 

To nothing inside them.

The sunk mill-towns were cemeteries

Digesting utterly 

All with whom they swelled.

Now, coil behind coil,

A Wind-parched ache,

An absence, famished and staring,

Admits tourists

To pick among crumbling, loose molars

And empty sockets.

                                                Ted Hughes, 'Remains Of Elmet', 1979

                                        

Thanks for reading, S ;-)