JEAN TURNBULL, The Impact of Motor Transport on Westmorland c.1900–1939

Abstract

gin. Ponds and lakes were created by local landowners and landscapers for aesthetic and leisure purposes. Mill ponds were constructed in large numbers by textile manufacturers seeking a readily accessible source of water: there were at least 150 mill ponds in Leeds by the early twentieth century. Water was required for many textile processes, of course, including scouring, bleaching, fulling, wet spinning (of flax), cropping, as well as for regular washing and cleaning activities, for fighting mill fires, and to supply steam engines. One of Silson’s most interesting observations is that many of the mill ponds drew their water from wells, boreholes and springs, rather than from goits or mill races fed by streams and rivers. Yet, the underground water table to the west of Leeds was in places hundreds of feet below the surface. Thus, while it has often been asserted that the steam engine liberated the British textile industry from the geographical tyranny of having to locate near running streams with often uncertain volumes of water, in fact the precocious spread of flax and woollen mills in the Leeds area likely depended, at least in part, on manufacturers’ ability to access underground sources of water, and on drilling and pumping capacities. Another point that emerges is the transience and impermanence of many of these bodies of water. Ponds disappeared sometimes within a few years of their construction. Mill ponds would be filled when their mill was closed down or demolished, or, in the case of Holly Park Dam, Calverley, when electric power replaced old boilers. The fate of stretches of water that were the inadvertent result of other activities could be equally uncertain. Hollow basins filled with water when open cast mines and quarries were abandoned or when old underground mines subsided. Several of the lakes in the ‘Lake District’ to the south-east of Leeds owed their origins to mining, but have been preserved as nature reserves and recreational sites. Other quarry and mining lakes were filled in or had colliery waste dumped into them to create slag heaps. Silson ends his account on an optimistic note, describing the development of Central Park in east Leeds, located between new residential housing and Thorpe Park retail estate. The park has now six small lakes where there were none in 1980. As many of their predecessors did over the past three centuries, these developers have recognised the commercial value of creating bodies of water in the area, as well as the positive role that water and the natural habitat can play in people’s well-being.