A map are almost aways helpful in historical research but naturally the interests of the surveyor, or map-maker, may not coincide with the local or family historian who subsequently consults it. This plan from the Local Studies Library Reserve Collection shows an area south of Allerton village & Allerton Road, east of Hill Top Lane and north of Dog Lane.

Very well displayed is an extensive area of stone exploitation. There is no indication of this on the first or second 6” Ordnance Survey maps of the area. It is present on the much more detailed 1890 25” OS map and it survives into the 1930s which is as far as I can follow with maps. The planned roads don’t seem to have been constructed during this time. All this suggests that our map, which is undated, is probably from the last decade of the nineteenth century or the early twentieth century. However you have to be cautious since the area marked in red will reflect underground workings, not surface features which would have been much more modest.

This then is really the plan of a stone mine, not a quarry. You may just be able to make out four ‘old shafts’ and a single ‘present shaft’. The pink areas represent stone already won or ‘got’, and evidently the land-owner has imposed a strict boundary to the exploitation. Good stone was not infrequently mined. Some years ago I was shown round some old mining sites in Shropshire where limestone was obtained in this way. This map includes no evidence of ownership although nearby Allerton Grange Farm was on Atkinson-Jowett (Clockhouse Estate) land. I have access to an estate map for the estate in Heaton and Bolton but it doesn’t extend this far. Contemporary trade directories list many stone merchants situated in Allerton any of whom could have been involved with operating this site.

What rock was exploited in Allerton? In many parts of Yorkshire it would have been possible to rob a Roman fort or the ruin of a dissolved monastery to obtain building stone, but not here. But there were plentiful glacial erratic stones left by ice movement, mainly of limestone and millstone grit. Later Bradford ‘delvers’ could obtain a good quality, honey coloured, sandstone from underground. Quarrying is thought to have begun in this area in the seventeenth century and continued until the twentieth. The local geological guides record Elland Flags being mined and quarried in Allerton and Heaton. This is a sandstone stratum consisted of several bands of varying thickness and quality which were located above the Better Bed coal seam, itself extensively mined in south Bradford.

What element of the map is unsatisfactory? Well at present I am trying to compile a database of nineteenth century Bradford churches and chapels from the many reserve maps and images the LSL possesses. So I should like to have had a denominational label for the chapel in Allerton Road / Garforth Street at about 12 o’clock on the map. Fortunately, the early OS maps record a Congregationalist Church and Sunday School at this site. Allerton Congregationalist Church on Allerton Lane was established in 1814 and rebuilt in 1872, the new build is almost certainly the one mapped here. I have yet to find an early photograph but I am continuing to search. Identifying a place of worship is not always easy. In Allerton at this time if you walked down the hill from this church you would pass a Baptist Church, an Anglican Church and a Wesleyan Methodist Chapel within a few hundred yards. Altogether I have 245 churches and chapels in the database, but I am fairly certain there are several that have so far escaped the recording angel.