Here, Robin Longbottom explains how seemingly-insignificant stones found locally were once vital to the area’s economy...

OUR heritage is – more often than not – seen in the terms of grand houses such as Cliffe Castle and East Riddlesden Hall, monumental mills such as Dalton Mill and small, picturesque, weavers’ and mill workers’ cottages like the row in Oldfield Lane to the west of Oakworth.

In order to preserve these structures they are recorded on the National Heritage List by Historic England, a public body charged

with looking after England’s historic environment.

However, there are some structures from our past that have gone largely unnoticed and unrecorded.

On the other side of the road from a row of listed cottages in Oldfield Lane and running towards Oakworth is a length of rather ramshackle field wall.

At first glance it would appear to be nothing out of the ordinary and yet it is.

Built into it at regular intervals of ten yards and running for some one hundred yards is a series of stones each with a hole, about one inch in diameter and four or five inches deep, drilled into it.

Insignificant as they may seem these stones were once pivotal to the local economy and were linked to the handloom weavers that worked in the cottages and farms in the surrounding district.

The purpose of these curious stones is recorded in the annals of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, a member of which interviewed an elderly resident of

Luddenden around the turn of the 19th century.

He was enquiring after a series of stones along a bridleway outside Luddenden. These stones differed to the ones at Oldfield, they were flagstones with a notch in the top that were set against a long, straight length of wall, but the purpose was the same.

The old gentleman recalled: “theease stooans wor used for warp stretchin’. Aw’ve stretched mony and mony a hundred warps here misseln, or helped ta do, i’ t’ days when t’spinning wheel, hand cooamin’, and hand loom weivin’ wor i’ gooa.”

He went on to recall that the warp (the yarn on a loom through which the shuttle passed with the weft) was carried to the wall in what was known as a ‘piece pooak’, or ‘warp bag’, to keep it clean.

He said that ash sticks were stuck into the gaps in the dry stone wall and supported by the flagstones and that the warp was ‘paid aat’, or unrolled, along the top of the

sticks.

The warp was secured at either end of the wall by a stouter stick known as a ‘raddle’. Once laid out it was stretched before having size (a flour and water paste) applied to give it additional strength to avoid it breaking on the loom. The wall was known as a ‘warping gate’.

At Oldfield Lane the sticks, or pegs, to support the warp were pushed into the holes in the stones along the wall.

Identical walls with similar stones have been found at Keighley Road, Denholme, at Micklethwaite Lane, Micklethwaite, and at Barrows Lane in Steeton. No doubt there are others yet to be discovered.

At Barrows Lane, only the stones at the lower end of the wall have survived but these include two stones with much wider and deeper holes that probably once held a ‘raddle’ stick.

The larger stones that supported a ‘raddle’ are now missing from the other three examples, perhaps because the ends of the walls have been rebuilt over the years.

During the first quarter of the 19th century sizing machines were developed and ‘warping gates’ became redundant.

However, a few handloom weavers may have continued to use them well into the 19th century and the examples that have survived in our local area still remind us of a once important, but now largely forgotten, cottage industry.