Halifax, Yorkshire

[DanaC]

There was a little piece of doggerel in the 17th century which went like this...
"From Hell, Hull and Halifax, Lord protect us"

Halifax is quite a small semi rural town in West Yorkshire. a hop skip and jump away from the foothills of the Pennines and the achingly beautiful Moors which inspired the famous "Wuthering Heights"

It was one of the places where condemned men ( and women and even on occasion children) were taken for execution. We still have a street called Gibbet Street.....and a later model of the gibbet still exists. A dark edge then to the history of this little town. A town built on dye works and sheep farms.

I live in a little village on the outskirts of the town. Northowram. One of several small villages and hamlets, many of which are recorded in the Domesday Book ( 1086) Neither poor nor affluent but pitched somewhere in between, it has working farms and a lot of space.

Picturesque and rugged, a valley curves out and away into the distance. Sheep and cows graze on the heather and rock strewn sides of the valley. Vertical grazing is something animals in this place learn early.....

Stone build cottages shelter us from the whipping winds and rains....and shade us from the glaring sun. Its a strangely beautiful landscape. Not the delicate and and almost too perfect beauty of the South.....Here the land is scarred by rockfalls and the hillsides and valleys pitted with holes from the collapsing ancient tin mines underneath.

For a Manchester lass like me, all this space was intoxicating when I first moved here. The horizon has become a distant thing....No longer blocked from view by row upon row of dull red brick housing and poverty edged industry...I love it here.