Post-Industrial Yorkshire

Walking my dog this weekend, I ended up in the ruins of an old mill.

It was called Buck Mill and it was on the banks of the River Aire. Seemingly, a mill of some sort had been there since the 17th century, but it fell into disuse in the late 1800s and was demolished in the 1930s.

Now, it is a half buried pile of stones, overgrown with moss and vegetation at the side of a footpath where nobody would even take a second glance.

For hundreds of years, this was where the people of the local area brought their wheat for grinding into flour. So it was the economic heart of this little corner of West Yorkshire.

By the time of the industrial revolution, it looked much like UNESCO World Heritage Site Salt's Mill a couple of miles up the waterway - but in what turned out to be a really crappy location.

The late Victorians built a bridge but it was too late for the mill. The bridge is in excellent condition for something of its age.

This is what Buck Mill looks like from the pathway to the bridge. You would not know it was there unless you took the trouble to look at the sign situated a strangely long way away from the actual site.



Buck Wood is full of huge chunks of rock (millstone grits, as it happens) and old bits of drystone wall. Apparently, there was a neolithic settlement in there thousands of years ago - although the evidence thereof today is pretty much restricted to the sort of post-holes and thoroughly mundane-looking bits of stone that archaeologists seem to get so excited about.

So it would be easy just to imagine that this ruined mill was nothing more than a natural phenomenon or yet another wall people stopped giving a toss about at some point in the past.

And yet it isn't. This is what happens to industrial heritage that stops being useful before people become nostalgic.

Working in the supremely ephemeral field of online marketing as I do, it was quite eerie walking around the practically invisible aftermath of a former phase of the UK's economy. Will we even leave this much of a trace a hundred years from now?

More to the point, what is down this mysterious hole? I didn't get any closer than this, but there is clearly a subterranean structure down there...

It was at this point that I was cursing my iPhone.

Sure, it takes good pictures, but why no zoom? Jesus, phones I had three or four years ago had zooms on their cameras!

Which is itself quite ironic, in terms of how quickly we come to take things that are quite miraculous in their own way for granted, and how unimaginable a different way of life really is.

Look at the state of the river if you want a lesson in taking things for granted.

This is a little side channel off the main Aire. When it's high, the water flows through. When it's low - as you can see - it's just a depository for all the crap that has fallen in or been thrown in upsteam.

Plastic bags look like being our generation's main legacy to future archaeologists.

And there are people living down here too. This was not actually at the mill, but a few hundred yards away.

We like to sneer at the Victorians and their class snobbery, their disregard for the poor, the squalor hidden away from respectable people. We are much more civilised, aren't we?

And yet here is a duvet in a reedbed.

Here are some burned cans of beer. This is within walking distance of my house (obviously).

I don't really know where I'm going with all this.

It was pouring with rain. It was freezing cold. That might have heightened the overall melancholy of the experience.

I just found the whole thing extremely sad. We like to think that society progresses, and yet here was evidence of it going backwards. Of traces of civilisation just being left to rot.

The only evidence that anyone is remotely concerned about what goes on down there once the joggers, dog walkers and cyclists are safely tucked up in bed was this. A fitting metaphor, I thought.