The Piece Hall, Halifax and Tuel Lane Lock, Sowerby Bridge

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This morning we filled the car to the brim with luggage for four before heading to The Kitchen in Keighley to have breakfast with Janet and Jill’s Aunty Kathleen. Janet and Jill are looking forward to going home, but will miss their family in Yorkshire very much. With several visits to this area under her belt, Janet drew on her local knowledge to suggest a couple of interesting things for us to see on the way back to Manchester.

From Keighley we drove south on the A629 to Halifax to visit The Piece Hall. The Piece Hall was built as a venue for handloom weavers to sell the woollen cloth ‘pieces’ they produced.It opened on 1 January 1779 and featured 315 separate rooms, around a central open courtyard, in which the cloth merchants could store their wares.

At this time the production of woollen cloth was a cottage industry. The farmer’s wives spun the wool into yarn and the farmers wove the yarn into cloth in the evenings after they had finished tending the farm. This enabled them to supplement the income that they made farming the land. A ‘piece’ measured 30 yards in length and was the amount of cloth that a farmer could weave in a week. The farmer would sell his ‘piece’ of cloth to a cloth merchant who would then take it to a town like Halifax to sell it at a Piece Hall.

The Piece Hall at Halifax is a particularly fine and ambitious example of a cloth trading hall and is the only one to have survived to be able to tell the tale of the scale and importance of the cloth trade, not just to the history of Halifax and West Yorkshire, but to the nation as a whole over some 800 years between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. I found the story fascinating, but I guess that is because I visit Spotlight at least weekly and have a bit of a fabric fetish!

Unfortunately, the grand Piece Hall at Halifax was opened soon after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and in just 20 years it became redundant because cloth was being manufactured in factories much more cheaply and it was sold directly to the consumers. An eight hundred year old industry was mechanised and modernised in just a few decades.

In 1868 the Piece Hall became a wholesale market hall and this use continued until the 1970s at which time it had become too run down to continue in this role. The magnificent Georgian building was nearly demolished until government grants were made available and the Halifax Corporation received funding to make the building a tourist attraction.

The rooms and courtyard were further modernised in a project that was finished last year and there are now lots of boutique shops housed in the rooms surrounding the courtyard. Poor Bernie, imagine being at a place that houses dozens of boutique shops with three women!? While Janet, Jill and I browsed soap shops, card and gift shops and clothing shops Bernie walked all around the courtyard taking photos, found a bike shop outside to browse in and took a stroll down the main street of Halifax before returning to the courtyard wondering how he was ever going to get the girls on the move!

From Halifax we headed down the A58 into Sowerby Bridge. Sowerby Bridge’s claim to fame is the Tuel Lane Lock which is a canal lock on the Rochdale Canal. It was built in 1996 as part of the canal's restoration and replaces two previous locks, locks 3 and 4, from the original canal system. With a fall of 19 feet and eight and a half inches (6 metres), it is the deepest lock in the United Kingdom. Due to its extreme depth, operation of the lock by boat crews is not permitted. Passage is controlled by a lock keeper. The lock is situated immediately to the west of the 114-yard (104 metre) Tuel Lane Tunnel and boat crews are advised to wait beyond the tunnel until passage into the lock is clear, as the tunnel is subject to turbulence when the lock is emptying.

We had been lucky with the weather up until this point but, as it started to drizzle, we took shelter in a cafe where we had a light lunch. After lunch we continued down the A58 until Ripponden where we turned onto the A672 which ran alongside the M62 for several miles until eventually we were able to merge onto the motorway.

We continued on the M62 around the north of Greater Manchester before heading southwards into Salford where Janet and Jill will be staying at the Novotel for a couple of nights. There were cranes everywhere in Salford indicating that that sector of Greater Manchester is undergoing considerable redevelopment at the moment. With Janet and Jill safely delivered to the Novotel we headed back to Stalybridge by way of the Hyde Road.

After dinner we played cards and, finally, I won another game of Jo ... under controversial circumstances though. Albert had been waiting and waiting for a Queen of Hearts so he checked the remaining deck for the elusive queen. Hmmn, there was no Queen of Hearts. A check of the discard pile established that there wasn’t a Queen of Hearts in there either. A thorough check of the two decks that we have been playing with all week revealed that we have been playing with only one Queen of Hearts and only one King of Hearts. Oh dear!

I felt bad about taking everyone’s money when we hadn’t been playing with two full decks so I offered to split the pot four ways. Albert and Bernie declined my gesture to share the winnings so my money jar received a much needed top up. We followed up with a couple of games of 31s. I didn’t feel so bad after Albert won two games of 31s on the trot! Poor Bernie is having the worst run of luck at cards in living memory. He has still not won a game of ANYTHING that we have played!



Steps: 9,997 (7.56kms)

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