1.27 BIE c.1850 PLA BHM 402 B7

Annotated: Miss Currer’s Spoil Banks, Bierley

Paper Scale: 2.5 chains: 1 inch Size: 70*48 cm Condition: Poor. Minor repairs made

This tinted plan, drawn in blank ink, maps two areas near Odsal Woods and Newhall. The main item drawn is the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Company’s line from Halifax to Bradford. The plan is not dated but is annotated on the back, in contemporary copperplate, ‘Miss Currer’s Spoil Banks, Bierley’. There are pencil annotations on the plan itself. The plan clearly predated the railway track and on the basis of one pencil annotation I have given it a provisional date of 1850, although it could be a year or two earlier.’

Orientation is not easy and it helps to have the first OS map of the area to refer to. Note that the cross-hatched track of the future railway line appears to be travelling west, but is in fact heading south in a tunnel or cutting. It is easiest to start with the bottom plan, on the right of which is marked the ‘turnpike road to Halifax’ (The Leeds & Halifax Trust). At the bottom right of this plan you may notice Newhall, sketchily drawn in pencil. The line continues in a tunnel being crossed by a mineral carrying tramway near a building marked ‘house damaged’. A nearby area of spoil is to be removed to allow the ‘free use of the tramway’. The surface field boundaries are marked and at the extreme left the line emerges from Bowling tunnel into a cutting. The position is picked up at the right of the upper plan.

In the top plan Odsal Wood is on the extreme right although the immediate area is called Newhall Wood, which is part of Odsal Wood, on the OS map. The line continues south passing a reservoir which is also present, but is unnamed, on the OS map. Again the field boundaries are drawn. On the left a straight line making an acute angle with the railway track is another mineral carrying tramway leading to the Bowling Iron Company. The plans seem to be concerned with the direction of the line, together with the preservation of these mineral carrying tramways. The area immediately to the north of this plan was extensively exploited for coal and ironstone, so the source of mining spoil is easy to envisage though it is hard to know where these spoil banks are.

‘Miss Currer’ is presumably Miss Frances Mary Richardson Currer (1785-1861) of Eshton Hall, near Gargrave. She was the posthumous daughter and heir of Rev. Henry Richardson Currer (1758–1784), and so the great-granddaughter of noted botanist Dr Richard Richardson (1663-1741) of Bierley Hall. I assume this was the route by which she came to acquire the Bierley spoil tips! Miss Currer was a famous bibliophile and patron of North Bierley Chapel. She seems to have lived at Eshton Hall all her life and never married. There just may be a Bronte connection since Charlotte used the pseudonym Currer Bell at one time