COT c1855 PLA

Size: 10 *16 inches

Material: Paper

Date: undated

Scale: 5 chains to 1 inch

In the 18^th century, a great deal of land was still ‘common’. The local Lord of the Manor and local residents (commoners) shared various rights over it such as the grazing of animals, collecting of wood, and digging turf. As a means of agricultural intensification commons were eventually enclosed by Act of Parliament and the land allotted, in proportion, to those with existing rights. The new freeholders of enclosed fields had various duties, such as the construction of boundary walls or the erection of barns, before their ownership was proven. Then they could farm or sell their new property as they saw fit. I don’t know the exact date of the Cottingley enclosures but this process was occurring in adjacent Heaton and Shipley in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

This map is undated but includes a list of local landowners which can be used for dating purposes. Rev Samuel Baines (1772-1835) and Sarah Tweedy (1788-1868) married at St Peter’s in 1810. Samuel was a minister at Wilsden independent chapel. He died in 1835 and clearly was dead when this map was drawn up. Mr W B Ferrand must have been William Busfeild Ferrand (1809-1889) who would have become a large landowner after his mother’s death in 1854.

I shall estimate the date of the map as c.1855 which means it should closely resemble the first OS map of the area, which indeed it does. Turning to the map itself the watercourse is most helpful in orientation since this must be the Cottingley Beck. In the top right corner is a small fragment of the Keighley and Bradford turnpike (now Cottingley Cliffe Road) and off it leads, reasonably enough, Cottingley Moor Road which has kept its original name. A Mrs Ogden evidently owned this parcel of land. Follow Cottingley Moor Road down and to the left. It is crossed by North Bank Road (Noon Nick Lane) which becomes Lee Lane. Just beyond this junction is Cottingley Moor Bridge. Off Lee Lane is a thoroughfare leading, in the first OS map, to ‘Stoker Bottom’ at position E & D which the Rev and Mrs Baines own. By the time of the 1891 OS 25” map there is a dwelling called Stock House here in which their son Thomas Baines (1811-1899), a worsted manufacturer, lived at the times of the 1861-1871 censuses.