We’re some 15,000 years too late for Bingley to put in a bid to host the next Winter Olympic Games, but there’s plenty of evidence around that back then it would have been cold and icy enough.

It helps to remember that technically we are still in a glacial epoch, the Pleistocene period, with its four northern hemisphere major ice advances and retreats, each separated by warm periods of around 20,000 years. We’re about half way through this latest interglacial, though we are doing our fossil fuel best to make sure that it doesn’t cool down again.

The last ice advance ended around 12,000 years ago and as that’s but a moment in geological time, there’s still plenty of evidence of what the local area would have been like when the temperature was about five degrees colder.

At the glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, the Aire Valley was the route of a glacier spreading out east towards where the North Sea is now. It was more than 400ft thick, reaching as high as the Druids Altar at St Ives, and the general level of the moors.

The scouring out of the valley and the dropping of boulder clay, mixed fragments of rock, much of it from Ingleborough and the Lakes, was to be expected, but the really significant features developed as the ice was melting. All the water had to drain away, and much of it was trapped at the sides of the glacier and ended up cutting escape channels.

They can now be seen as steep-sided dry valleys close to the crest of the main Aire valley. Cut by water pouring out of lakes ponded back in the Harden and Cullingworth valleys, they linked up with a larger lake trapped in the Bradford bowl.

A good example is Noon Nick, above Cottingley, and it can be followed along Stoney Ridge Road and across to High Bank Lane where it continues as the dry valley by Northcliffe Golf Club. It then passes down through Northcliffe woods to Bradford Road where the torrent deposited a delta, now the site of flats for the elderly.

Chellow Dene was another overflow route, pouring water into Lake Bradford which then overflowed south and east, cutting the gaps in which Odsal stadium nestles, and the railway line through Tyersal.

Once these lakes drained away, the retreating ice deposited two large terminal moraines across the main valley floor – one at Hirst Wood, by Nab Wood cemetery, and the other in Bingley, with the high point on the main road providing the site for the old Building Society.

Bingley is still warming up, but for how much longer?