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 to be 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 or 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 ;-)

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A Favourite Poet (or Two)

The problem in choosing one poet from the legions that have had an influence over a lifetime is the feeling that there are ghosts gathering in the room, perhaps displeased with my choices. So it must be those alchemists of the language who “ blew me away “ on first reading them, who made me fall in love with poetry when I had no intention of writing any.

Dylan Thomas drew me to visit Laugharne and I still have a painting of him sitting in his workroom overlooking the estuary of the river Taff writing the wonderful “Fern Hill,” “And Death shall have no Dominion.” The dissolute lifestyle and too - young death were part of the attraction for me. Brendan Kennelly was a poet who I felt connected with, each time I read him something different emerged. Someone said a poem should move the head, the tongue and the heart and I try to remember this as a guide. Another Irish poet, whose eccentric style was a joy to read was Paul Durcan, who I was lucky to meet on a course and really enjoyed his company.

So after this preamble I have selected the two greatest influencers, in my honest but totally unoriginal opinion as mind-blowers. They are Ted and Sylvia. I was hooked years ago by Plath, not having read anything to compare with her, and Hughes’s affinity with nature has produced some of the best writing on this subject I have read.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston Massachusetts USA in 1932 and was educated in that country until she received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge England. It was here she met Ted Hughes and an immediate relationship was formed. Sylvia wrote poems tied to her personal experience and used starkly expressive work tied to a feeling of alienation. Her well known poems are “Daddy” “Lady Lazarus” and the novel “The Bell Jar”. She was a major poet of the Confessional school which Robert Lowell belonged to.

Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd in 1930 deep in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire and was heavily influenced by the huge overhanging cliff there and his adventures in the countryside making him have a realistic, non sentimental view of nature. He had an attachment to folklore and mythology. He went to Cambridge University in 1951 and married Plath in 1956.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Their story is not a happy one although their meeting of hearts, souls, body and mind produced strong, passionate poetry, Ted didn’t fit the restrictions of children and marriage and escaped from their farm in Devon to commence an affair with Assia Wevill, who although giving birth to a daughter couldn’t get him to commit to her.

Sylvia, left with two young children in a London flat in the extremely harsh winter of 1962//3 killed herself. Ted was devastated and stopped writing for 3 years but then Assia also took her own and her daughter’s life.

It is a high octane tragedy and you wonder how Hughes recovered enough to carry on, remarrying eventually and becoming The Poet Laureate in 1984 .One tale he told was of studying English at university and the essay wouldn’t gel so he went to bed and a fox in his dream showed him its charred paws saying “ Look what you are doing to us”, He changed his course the next day to Anthropology. He died in 1963.

This poem was written after that dream and is his first animal poem –

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside the clock’s loneliness 

And this blank page where my fingers move, 

Through the window I see no star: 

Something more near 

Though deeper within darkness 

Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; 

Two eyes serve a movement, that now 

And again, now and now, and now

 

Sets neat prints into the snow 

Between trees, and warily a lame 

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 

Of a body that is bold to come

 

Across clearings, an eye, 

A widening deepening greenness, 

Brilliantly, concentratedly, 

Coming about it’s own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 

It enters the dark hole of the head. 

The window is starless still, the clock ticks, 

The page is printed. 

                                Ted Hughes

You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, 

Feet to the stars and moon-skulled, 

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense 

Thumbs down on the dodo’s mode 

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, 

Trawling your dark as owls do, 

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth 

Of July to All Fools' day, 

O high-riser, my little loaf. 

Vague as fog and looked for like mail, 

Farther off than Australia. 

Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn. 

Snug as bud and at home 

Like a sprat in a pickle jar. 

A creel of eels, all ripples, 

Jumpy as a Mexican bean. 

Right, like a well-done sum. 

A clean slate, with your own face on. 

                                  Sylvia Plath 

A more cheerful one during her pregnancy.

Thanks for reading. Cynthia Kitchen

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What we below could not see

A guest post by David Riley

What’s the best poetry about spring? I’ll tell you, it’s my job to pontificate. It’s when humans are, at most, at the edge of things. Take Seamus Heaney’s Rite of Spring, for example. Spring is there and does better than people can, who can only imitate its liberating effects.

Even more, people can be removed from things, as Ted Hughes does in The River in March. His river is an elemental force, it might even be a deity in itself. In Heaney and Hughes there are things the river and Spring can be and do - they don’t stand for something, they are something.

Wordsworth knew it too - his daffodils are beauty on a hillside, whether there are people there to see it or not.

Jane Hirschfield is excellent at showing how nature is really something other. We may dress it up and give it names, develop amnesia every year when the same seasons come around and trot out our same banalities but it is that something of itself, beyond us, that she shows.

Edward Thomas in his many meditations on nature sometimes links human activity and the seasons. At other times, he urges us to take a step back or rather to another position altogether, where we might see nature as other creatures do. Read his Thaw. See what you think. 

Rooks are back again by Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov

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Immersion Therapy

Good evening readers,

This week on the Dead Good Blog we've been looking at Absorption.
Absorption isn't something I tend to do lightly. I try and stay out of getting too deep into things for a fear of becoming completely engrossed. In short, I try and stay out of the action if I can. This makes me a bad, lazy poet and so from time to time, I get stuck right in to the books- feel compelled to seek out the landscapes and generally waste about a week submerged in my own little world of thoughts.
There is though, a rapidly approaching workshop at the library that I'm meant to be taking with Lindsay, and so, as I haven't yet had a chance to message her on facebook, be assured that I am considering the options and am aware of a rapidly shortening deadline.
This, I find, is helping me to be a little more poetic. In preparation I have been reading  from 'Poetry in the Making'  by Ted Hughes. The book has proved something of a gem in so far as it has an entire chapter entitled Wind and Weather- the very theme I'm supposed to be thinking about.
Ted's little guide to writing and teaching poetry, with its chapters on topics such as studying animals, has inspired me this week to think about the way I actually write. I've been captivated by the way in which the idea of capturing an animal in a poem can preserve the moment forever. On that note then, I've been working on an idea I got last week on a walk when I saw the first bee I've seen all year out collecting pollen. Obviously, it is still very much a work in progress and nowhere near the standard of the examples in the book but, for a start whilst I'm giving up end-rhyme, it is at least a bit of a poem.

The Bee

Setting out amongst the trees
Perching a while to survey the meadow:
The pollen in the flowers,
The sun in the puddles.

This is the time to collect up the goodness.

Winter held on too strong.
Laboriously it has clung to the isle
Fields flooded out

No petals to see

Then the world started turning again.

Like a cog in the wheel

Turning steady time

It is on to the next, inquisitively
Round and around,

Round and around
 

Until gathered,

it returns, heavy laden
Stains a mark on the page-

This the pollen.

Thanks for reading,
S.

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YAWPING

As many of you know, three months ago I decided to take a break from the blog in order to focus on my MA poetry portfolio. I am pleased to say that said portfolio is now finished, prettily bound and sitting on a desk waiting to be marked. Therefore, with little more than nail biting and worrying to endure over the coming weeks, I’m now in a position to return and start blogging again.

When I discovered the theme for my first week back there was definitely a small sigh of despair. I’ve always been a keen and varied reader but, somehow, comic books have never really made it onto that reading list.

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