Skipton Woods was in bright, warm sunshine with a clear blue sky when, as a follow-up to our talk last September, Dr Kenneth Jackson led us on a walk to look for evidence of the industrial past there, on 6 March. We heard that the quarrying in the woods area moved further afield around 1785 when a cotton mill was opened on the site. Kenneth pointed out three abandoned and now wooded quarries, and the new site of Haw Bank in the distance near Embsay.
We saw signs of the railway trackway used to bring material from Haw Bank, and buttresses which supported chutes to send down loads of it into waiting road waggons and into boats on the canal. We learnt that a goit is a small water channel used to supply mills and saw the route it took along the site, plus dams and even the remains of an aqueduct. Although the main cotton mill building had been demolished, we could see where the goit would have fed into the water wheel which was inside the mill.
These are just the highlights – Kenneth’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the site and surrounding area, not to mention the geology, made this walk fascinating. It was wonderful to hear his stories of playing around the site as a child when a lot of the evidence was more apparent than it is now. He and his friends even played around the ruined staithe right on the precipitous side of the canal during their dinner time from school – a health and safety nightmare!
