BOWLING BECK 

2.157   BOW c1848 PLA

Bowling Beck & Railway Lines

Material: tracing paper  Date: c1848    Scale: unk

Size: 55*32 cm  Condition: poor

Keywords: Bowling, Beck, Railway, Chapel Green, Low, Law, 1840s

The original purpose of this map is a puzzle. The most prominent features are watercourses. These are not named but are evidently the Low (or Law) Beck which joins the Bowling Beck above Bowling Old Mill; the resulting watercourse went under Cuckoo Bridge to join the Bradford Beck itself. The overall arrangement of buildings closely resembles the 1849 borough map. It is odd that St James’s Church (constructed 1838) is not drawn. A straight but interrupted line marks the course of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway into Drake Street station (1850) perhaps not completely constructed at this time. Drake Street is not drawn but the words ‘Railway Station’ appear. The Halifax-Leeds line through Bowling Junction is fully inked in and places where it intersects roads are noted. The reservoir and dye-pits attached to Bowling Dye works are not drawn which all suggests a map date of 1846-1850.

Rather confusingly in the horizontal ‘V’ formed by the two railway lines (and surrounding the words ‘Railway Station’) is drawn what appears to be a large artificial lake and sluice. This is simply an enlargement of the same feature present, at a much smaller scale, elsewhere. The watercourse ends at a Mill Dam overlooked by Ivy House and Bowling Old Mill.

The plan is not the most high quality production. It looks like a copy produced by someone showing good penmanship but not perhaps a professional map maker. Subsequent use of the map is indicated by pencil letters A-R along the course of Low Beck until it reaches Thornton Lane in Chapel Green. Thereafter there is a second sequence of numbers A-G. The words ‘pit quarry’ appear adjacent to L&M although no pit or old coal or ironstone pit is present at this site in the first OS map of the area (1852). The whole area was extensively mined so there is nothing inherently implausible about the annotation.