Road to Home 2022 Day 3: Cudworth - Wath-upon-Dearne - Bolton-upon-Dearne - Conisbrough

37 km 

(including wandering about Wath and detour to Bolton) 

I am a miner
Come walk with me
Today, tomorrow, eternity. 

- Monument to the miner by the bus stop outside my hotel in Cudworth 

The miner I walked with today was my Great-Grandad, John Limer (born on November 2, 1887 at 25 Midland Terrace Wath on Dearne, died July 7, 1916 near Thiepval, France). 

My great-grandfather, John Limer

Today St. Bernard's Way and the Trans-Pennine Trail took me to the birthplaces of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my mother! 

From my hotel in Cudworth, I returned to the trail at Monk Bretton, taking a brief detour to visit the ruins of the Abbey. It may come as a surprise to my readers in Italy that practically all the English monasteries and abbeys are in ruin, as Henry VIII had them all closed, perceiving them as a threat to the power of royalty. 

A beautiful morning in Monk Bretton 

The decaying abbeys are nonetheless surrounded by fences and locked gates, to keep people from getting up to no good among the ruins,  I suppose. In some you even have to pay admission. This one was free, but still closed at this hour of the morning, so I took a look through the fence and then returned to the trail. 

In just under ten kilometres I came to Manvers Lake. It's hard to believe that this recreational area, packed with boaters, windsurfers, golfers, people out walking their dogs and schoolchildren on a field trip observing the swans was once the grimy, smoky colliery (= coal mine) where my Great-Grandad spent so much of his short life.

Wath Main Colliery, 1910 - at the time my great-grandfather worked there

The same place, today

Memorial to the miners outside the golf club now located on the former mine site

 

It's not a spelling mistake - Wath Mainers are the miners who worked at Wath Main

I left the trail and proceeded into the village, to the monument to the fallen in the First World War outside the church of All Saints, where I spotted my great-grandfather's name at the bottom of the first column. 

From here I proceeded to the cemetery, but it was much bigger than I had imagined and though I wandered about for some time, I failed to find any names related to the family. Coal mining families probably could not afford fancy marble headstones and a place for all eternity in the graveyard. I thought I might at least find my great-grandmother, who lived to be over a hundred and died in the early '90's, but then again, she may well have been cremated. 

Walking about between the graves was unnerving because the ground was very uneven, so that I continually felt as though I was stumbling, and I couldn't help thinking about why it was that way... After a while I gave up and headed back into the centre of the village centre in seek of sustenance, as my stomach was demanding a return to the world of the living. 

There was a small market going on in the town square, making it hard to photograph because of all the parked vans of the market stall owners and all the people lining up for the jacket potato food truck. (Do they call them food lorries here??) But there was also an indoor market which advertised an upstairs café, and I went in, remembering from my days in London that these were generally places where you could get very simple, traditional English fare very cheap. 

And in fact £4.50 bought me a sandwich, salad and a giant bowl of apple and rhubarb crumble smothered in piping hot custard! 

When I went up to the counter to pay for my meal the older of the two ladies serving asked where I was from, which led to an explanation of why I was there, and I took advantage of the occasion to ask if she might know where Midland Terrace would have been. This is the street my great-grandparents lived on, and it no longer exists. 

As a result of my enquiry, the man at the table next to mine, the lady behind the counter and the fruit-seller in the market downstairs were all soon peering at the old photograph I had downloaded onto my phone from the Wath Upon Dearne Facebook page, showing Midland Terrace flooded in 1933. (Presumably that was the only time anyone ever bothered to take a photograph of it.) 

Midland Terrace, flooded in 1933

On the basis of clues in the photograph (the railway line, the tunnel under it, the presence of a body of water capable of flooding...), it was determined that Midland Terrace probably stood more or less where the present-day Tesco's supermarket parking lot is located. 

An inglorious end for what was an inglorious block of terraced brick coal miners' houses! But of great historical significance to my family. The address keeps cropping up on birth, marriage and death certificates of the early 1900's.

After passing through the Tesco's parking lot, walking along Moor Road I asked some men sitting outside the community centre the same question. I should have asked them first, on my way into the village, because they were able to tell me who would know all about the history of Wath! They also knew where the old train stations (yes, plural!) used to be, and the canal that was used to transport coal on barges even before the days of the railroad. 

But none of these remain today, and so we could only speculate on the exact location of my ancestors' home. 

I took up the Trans-Pennine Trail again and was soon in Bolton, where I took another brief detour to the address of the house where my mother was born. However the present house is a bungalow of more recent construction. So much has changed around these parts! 

My grandparents in Bolton, with my Mum as a baby. My Grandad was very dashing in those days! 

A historical note 

Wath upon Dearne

The town of Wath upon Dearne can be traced back to Norman times. It appears in the 1086 Domesday Book as Wad and Waith; the name has been linked to the Latin vadum and the Old Norse vath, meaning “ford” or wading place; and in fact just north of the town was a ford across the River Dearne.The town received a Royal Charter in 1312–1313 entitling it to a weekly Tuesday market and an annual two-day fair. It remained for some centuries a rural settlement at the junction of the old Doncaster–Barnsley and Rotherham–Pontefract roads.

In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Wath upon Dearne as follows:

WATH-UPON-DEARNE, a small town, a township, and a sub-district, in Rotherham district, and a parish partly also in Barnsley district, W. R. Yorkshire. The town stands near the Dearne and Dove canal, and near the Midland and the South Yorkshire railways, 6 miles N of Rotherham; occupies a pleasant eminence; and has a post-office under Rotherham, two railway stations, a hotel, a mechanics' institute, and a fair on 24 Nov. The township comprises 1,687 acres. Real property, £40,738; of which £35,043 are in railways, and £60 in gasworks. Pop. in 1851, 1,495; in 1861, 1,690. Houses, 353. The manor belongs to Earl Fitzwilliam. W. Hall is the seat of W. A. Earnshaw, Esq.; and Cross House, of W. Cadman, Esq. There are collieries, iron-works, potteries, and quarries... The church is ancient but good, and has a tower and spire. 

-   GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, History of Wath upon Dearne, in Rotherham and West Riding | Map and description, A Vision of Britain through Time. URL: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/1096

Coal Mining in Wath

The town lies over the South Yorkshire coalfield, where high-quality bituminous coal was dug from outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell pits for several centuries. Several high-grade seams are close to the surface, including the prolific Barnsley and Parkgate. The rising demand for coal arose from rapid local industrialisation in the 19th and early 20th century. The population swelled and local infrastructure developed round the coal-mining, but this reliance on one industry led to future problems.

The Dearne and Dove Canal was opened in stages from 1798 to 1804 to access the collieries on the south side of the Dearne Valley. It passed through the town on an embankment just north of the High Street and then turned north into the valley: this wide section was known locally as the "Bay of Biscay". The canal closed in 1961 after many years of disuse and poor repair; much of the canal line has since been used for roads, one of them called Biscay Way.

Rail took over coal transportation from the canal, and Wath upon Dearne became a rail-freight centre of national importance. Wath marshalling yard, built north of the town in 1907, was one of the biggest and for its time one of the most modern railway marshalling yards in the country, as one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester–Sheffield–Wath electrified railway (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project that spanned the Second World War and partly responded to the need to move large amounts of Wath coal to customers in North-West England.

By the 20th century, heavy industry was evident, with many large collieries such as Wath Main and Manvers Main. After the Second World War, the collieries clustered around Manvers developed into a complex, also covering coal preparation, coal products and a coking plant, which was not only visible, but polluted the air for miles around.

Manvers Colliery

The local coal industry succumbed to the dramatic decline in the British coal-mining industry precipitated by a change in government economic policy under the Thatcher government in the early 1980s, also affecting subsidiary local industries and causing much hardship in the town.

The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village considered part of Wath. Wath, and the whole of the Dearne Valley, was classified as an impoverished area and received public money, including European funds. These were put to regenerating the area from the mid-1990s onwards, causing a degree of economic revival. The area became more rural once again, as land to the north of the town once used by collieries and marshalling yards was returned to scrubland and countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks built over what was considered “brownfield land”.

Today, Wath is still emerging from the collapse of the coal industry, although jobs and some low-level affluence have returned to the area as distribution warehouses have opened in the area and new housing developments have been constructed over former mine sites.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wath_upon_Dearne

https://wath-on-dearne.com/wathondearne/

***

And a personal note

I wish to dedicate this walk to the memory of my great-grandfather, the miner who walks with me: Corporal John Limer of Wath on Dearne, who perished in battle in France on 7 July 1916, at the age of 28.

Today I visited his birthplace; when I continue St. Bernard's Way following the Via Francigena in France, I will visit his grave. 

And I also dedicate this walk to his first wife, Eliza Markham. Her name does not appear on any commemorative plaque, and she has been long-forgotten. All I know is that she died in childbirth in 1906, at the age of 19.