A home built on steam work! (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

A home built on steam work!

5:34pm Monday 17th July 2006 in

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More than 900ft above sea level, high in the Pennine hills, is a business blossoming on the fruits of an era long gone when steam ruled and engineering was big and brash. So in love with the location is one of its founders, that he has even built his new home on the site.

T&A Reporter Clive White reports.

Boilermaker Alan McEwen believes in living on the job.

Down the yard at the company premises of HA McEwen (Boiler Repairs) Ltd he has built his own home.

And he does not mind living cheek by jowl with huge rusting steam boilers or the noise and clatter of riveting hammers.

For 63-year-old Mr McEwen loves working on these big hulks because, when he looks up, across a drystone wall, he sees the majestic sweep of the landscape.

"We are perched less than half a mile from the Pennine Way on the watershed in Upper Airedale, 925ft above sea level. It is a wonderful location," said Mr McEwen, who has just finished building his new home 20 yards from the company's two main sheds in Cowling, west of Keighley.

"This is all part of my philosophy for living. I believe in reclamation and I am an admirer of Victorian engineering.

"It has been my ambition to put together these works and create a complementary environment. I love working with Victorian engineering and, at the end of the day, I love the peace and quiet of this fantastic countryside."

This friend of the late Fred Dibnah took six years to finish the house, working every weekend at Farling Top. It meant hunting high and low in every backwater of northern England to find the materials he needed. He visited old mills, chapels, churches, breweries, reclamation yards and demolition sites.

And it has resulted in the construction of a totally unique house.

The flag floors come from a weaving shed in Blackburn; the large stone arch separating the two main rooms downstairs was retrieved from a boiler house in Holmfirth; the magnificent fireplace was once the entrance to a 19th century mill in Rochdale and two huge support columns previously adorned the gateway to a factory in Elland.

Even the timber joists, the window heads and sills are "second-hand".

He loves to sit in his big leather chair, rather like the lord of the manor, in a house where the ceiling swoops into a high pitch and contemplate the Victorian splendour around him. But his attention will be diverted from the countryside to the box in the corner over the next few weeks when he will be appearing on television talking about his old pal Dibnah.

BBC2 has launched a new series on the celebrity steeplejack who died about two years ago in his mid-60s.

Mr McEwen and some of Mr Dibnah's other friends will be recalling their relationship with the man who stamped the wonders of Victorian engineering on the small screen.

"I knew Fred for more than 20 years and he was a one-off. We had the same interests and we met often to socialise and at events," said Mr McEwen.

"He was an amazingly versatile man - he could work a lathe; he was a smith and could forge, work on boilers and of course he was a fearless steeplejack. It was a great sadness when he died."

Mr Dibnah often visited Farling Top and admired Mr McEwen's steam museum he has set up in the works.

It contains three rare steam engines including a single-cylinder, slide-valve, horizontal engine built in Scotland in 1840.

Mr McEwen went to Cowling in 1977 with his then wife Marie and together they have built up the business repairing industrial boilers of every kind, but especially steam locomotive boilers for organisations like Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.

The company was founded by Mr McEwen in 1968 as a one-man outfit in Middleton, Lancashire, but he moved to the Keighley area in about 1970 when he fell in love with the Worth Valley when working for the K&WVR of which he is a member.

Staff have worked on a variety of jobs, repairing and maintaining locomotive boilers, traction engines, steam rollers, steam wagons and even steam boats.

He and Marie, who is the financial director and company secretary, have seen the company prosper and it now employ's seven, including their son Alasdair.

Commissions have come from leading industrial museums including the National Railway Museum in York and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

At present they are working on a number of projects including the major re-build of the boiler on the unique Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Barton-Wright 752 saddle-tank engine and other locomotive boilers which have come from preserved railways from as far away as Scotland and Sussex.

The company has a high reputation for design, construction, rebuilding and repairs and wins commissions from throughout the country, the work varying from all types of boiler repairs and rebuilds to constructing new fireboxes and re-tubing locomotive boilers.

• The series, Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone is made up of film footage not used in his other series. It is being broadcast on Wednesday on BBC2 at 8pm.