Road to Home 2022 Day 1: Leeds - Oulton

Leeds Oulton/Woodlesford 13 km

If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope. 

Rachel Joy, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Another Long Walk: after Road to Rome 2021, it's time for Road to Home 2022! 

This year's mad idea is to walk from my birthplace in Leeds, England to my home in Italy. 

Not necessarily all at once! 

Today I began the first section, from Leeds to Canterbury: a pilgrimage destination in its own right since the Middle Ages, as well as the starting point of the Via Francigena pilgrimage route to Rome and points south. 

This will be a highly personal pilgrimage for me, because St. Bernard's Way, a route that was already established before I came along to walk it from Leeds to the beginning of the Via Francigena, passes through many places of particular significance in the history of my family.  

Beginning in the place where I made my début in the world: Leeds, Yorkshire. 

Here's how Day 1 of Road to Home 2022 went! 

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Woke up at dawn with a charley horse - what a way to begin a new walk, with a cramp in my leg before I even got out of bed!! 😅

I soon gave up on the idea of going back to sleep, and listened to the birds heartily singing their dawn chorus, unfazed by the light but steady rainfall that was pattering down on the skylight in my attic bedroom. Then I made my way down to the kitchen and sat drinking tea and reading The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which my cousin had given me and which I judged worth carrying for as long as it takes me to finish it, until my cousin came down, made me a cup of coffee and took me to the station to catch the train to Leeds. 

I had been to Leeds in 2018 to discover what the town where I was born and lived in for the first three weeks of my life actually looked like, and here are a few of the pictures I took on that occasion. 

Leeds was a small manorial borough in the 13th century which became a major centre for the production and trading of wool in the 17th and 18th centuries and then a major mill town during the Industrial Revolution. Wool remained the dominant industry, but flax, engineering, iron foundries, printing and other industries also emerged. 

When I was in Leeds in 2018, I visited Leeds Industrial Museum at Armley Mills, located in a former textiles mill on the River Aire, an experience I highly recommend to get an idea of what factory workers' lives were like in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

On this visit, I did not spend much time in Leeds, just enough to purchase a few necessary items at the Decathlon (conveniently located right in front of the train station) and obtain my first stamp on my pilgrim's credential at the Cathedral. 

The Cathedral had only just opened for the day, and I found a lady arranging flowers on the altars, who took my pilgrim passport to a man with a vacuum cleaner, who took it to the priest in his back office. The man with the vacuum cleaner knew exactly what I meant when I asked for a stamp, so I musn't be the only pilgrim to have walked through Leeds! He returned my credential with a magnificent Leeds Cathedral stamp in bright red ink. 

But I did not actually start my walk at the Cathedral! I had a specific location in mind from which to begin this personal pilgrimage: the address that appears on my birth certificate.

 

And so I left the cathedral and headed for the University district to locate the address of my parents' lodgings at that time: my first home in the world. Here it is!

I didn't seem very impressed with it, judging from the few photographs taken of me in the three weeks I lived there! 

Me announcing my arrival in Leeds, June 1966 

Looking a little more content with life

The house appears to be empty today, with a for sale sign in the overgrown garden. 

At this point it was raining steadily, so I didn't hang around, but made my way down to the River Aire and the Aire and Calder Navigation Canal, part of Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and followed these parallel waterways out of town along a footpath that forms part of the Trans-Pennine Way. 

It soon stopped raining, and it was a very pleasant walk, in the company of the joggers, bikers, dog-walkers, ducks and swans of Leeds, surrounded by the sweet scent of hawthorn trees in blossom. I passed several locks on the way, and colourful canal boats. 

One of the many bridges I walked under today

Mother swan with six little ones. Dad was busy chasing the ducks away

Duckling (known locally as "dookling" 😁) 

Another slow traveller

Thwaite Watermill 

The Owl and the Pussycat, I presume? 😅

("... went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat") 

I left the canal path at Woodlesford Lock and walked up the main road into the town, aeriving at my accommodation just in time to connect up for a yoga lesson with my next door neighbour back home - the perfect way to end a day of walking! 

A historic note about Woodlesford 

The name Woodlesford most likely comes from Old English *wrīdels (meaning 'thicket') + ford, the ford being at a bend in the River Aire close to the present day Woodlesford lock on the Aire and Calder Navigation Canal. The existence of the town is first recorded between 1188 and 1202, but much of Woodlesford's expansion took place in the nineteenth century due to the mining and stone quarrying industries. 

The closest coal mining pit to the centre of the village was sunk to the Beeston seam in the 1870s, but was only operational for a few years; many of the miners employed there then moved to work at pits owned by T & R W Bower Ltd on the opposite side of the river. Miners living in Woodlesford also worked at the Rothwell pits owned by J & J Charlesworth. There was a big influx in population in 1911 when Henry Briggs, Son & Company Ltd sunk two shafts to the Beeston and Silkstone seam at Water Haigh. That pit stayed in production until 1970 when many from its workforce were made redundant or were dispersed to other collieries in the area and further afield on the Selby coalfield. The area declined when coal production at Rothwell ceased in 1983, but it has recovered largely due to its proximity to the centre of Leeds.

The village is also the home of Bentley's Yorkshire Bitter. The Bentley family started the brewery in 1828, but after the brewery was acquired by Whitbread plc in 1968, beer production ceased in 1972. 

My accommodation for the evening is a small room in the former stables of the local inn and pub, which stands astride the official boundary between Woodlesford and the neighbouring village of Oulton. The food in the pub is tasty, and affordable, but unfortunately Bentley is not on tap! 

 

GPS tracker took a break during the blue part in the middle....🤷‍♀️