Once upon a time the house which stood at the end of a narrow country lane on Idle Moor was aptly named. All Alone was precisely that when it was built in 1773 by Dr Samuel Ellis, a Calverley-born man who had been living in Warwickshire.

Now that house and others which were added to it over the years are surrounded by new development - although the road leading to them from Highfield Road is still signed as "All Alone Road, leading to All Alone". But when Dr Ellis returned to his native district and built his house on common land which had yet to be enclosed, it stood in splendid isolation.

Dr Ellis didn't live there alone. He was medical guardian to his companion, the Honourable Luke Plunkett, who lived with him until his death in 1798 and who, according to his gravestone in Calverley churchyard, was the brother of the Earl of Fingall in the Irish county of Meath - a title which had been created in 1628.

Why did the doctor have this role of a sort of minder to an obscure Irishman? Bradford historian Wade Hustwick speculated nearly 50 years ago that the Hon. Luke Plunkett might have been "a mental patient who required some attention or was kept away from his relatives in Ireland for some other cause".

All was not straightforward about the building of All Alone. Samuel Ellis built the house without the consent of the freeholders and in 1777 he was fined £1 7shillings by the Manor Court for transgressing on common land.

By the middle of the last century there were four houses at All Alone. The original house had been divided into two, a farmstead had been built next door and a smaller house had been attached to that.

When the bachelor Dr Samuel Ellis died in 1808, in his 89th year, the one house which then stood on the site went to Mary Pulleyn, the daughter of his brother, Benjamin Ellis.

Mrs Pulleyn never lived at All Alone. But her son (unnamed by Wade Hustwick in his account of All Alone's history) was probably living next door to his uncle when he married Ann Wade at Calverley Church in 1786, giving his occupation as "husbandman" - which Hustwick speculates could mean he was acting as farm steward to Dr Ellis.

All Alone passed through several hands before it was sold to George Vint, the Idle quarry owner. There was coal on Idle Moor (what is now Greenfield Lane, leading from Thackley to Idle, is still known to older locals as Coalpit Lane) but it was the search for stone which led to shafts being sunk all over it.

Wade Hustwick explained: "There are many shafts to be seen in the neighbourhood for it was found to be more economical to mine for the best stone rather than quarry it. Quarrying means the baring of much earth and rock but mining does not disturb the surface much."

One quarry which was excavated openly rather than via shafts was at the top bend in Westfield Lane. Well within living memory it was a deep hole in the ground accommodating a quarry pond where children fished for sticklebacks.

More than 30 years ago the quarry was filled in but the ground has sunk again, leaving a grassy indentation where the pond once was.

The number of shafts sunk in Idle Moor and the tunnels beneath it led to the belief that the land could never be built on. That has been proved to be a fallacy as housing development has steadily encroached on the open space and All Alone has become All Surrounded.

At the Westfield Lane end of what was once the track that crossed Idle Moor, passing All Alone on the way, is a row of cottages known as Starting Post.

This was the point from where the horse races which were once a feature of the quarrymen's lives used to set off.