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| A plaque on the old Sunday School |
My trip to Horbury was principally to see the Church of St. Peter and St. Leonard, with its spectacular example of the use of Woolley Edge Rock, but my usual plan of preparing a British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge to explore the town was stymied by the fact that someone had already photographed its listed buildings.
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| A brief exploration of Horbury |
During my preparation for my day out, I had used Google Street View to virtually explore the town and had noted a few buildings that looked quite interesting, even though they are not listed, so I devised a short walk that included some of these – starting on Queen Street.
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| Views of Queen Street |
Although John Carr had brought in Woolley Edge Rock from the area around Newmillardam, the Building Stones Database for England map explorer and old Ordnance Survey maps shows quarries in the Horbury Rock at Horbury Quarry and Storrs Hill Quarry, which presumably supplied most of the building stone for the vernacular architecture in Horbury.
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| Quarries on the Building Stones Database for England map explorer |
Having been quite fascinated by the range of decorative stones that have been used in the church, I took a couple of photos of the sadly dilapidated Grade I Listed Horbury Hall, which has been dated by dendochronology to 1478 and 1492 by documentation.
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| Horbury Hall |
It is built with massive sandstone that has some iron staining but no obvious Liesegang rings, with a stone slate roof, but I didn’t look at it closely and headed past the Cherry Tree Inn and the post office on Church Street towards Tithe Barn Street.
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| The Cherry Tree Inn and the post office |
The overcast conditions and the blackening of the masonry didn’t give me much reason to stop and look at this sandstone, which the British Geological Survey GeoIndex describes as “relatively soft, fine-grained yellow and brown sandstone, wedge-bedded, with layers of sandy mudstone”.
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| Views of St. Leonard's Hospital |
St. Leonard's Hospital (1888) is a terrace of one bedroom almshouses, which was built in the memory of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1877 by the vicar of Horbury, Canon John Sharp, to replace an older almshouse on the site.
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| The inscribed plaque on St. Leonard's Hospital |
Horbury Stone, which has a muddy grey/brown colour with some iron staining, has presumably been used for the rock faced walling stone, with the dressings, foundation stone and the inscribed plaque on the east elevation having the same colouration.
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| The old town lock up |
Next to St. Leonard’s church is the first of three Grade II Listed buildings on Tithe Barn Street, the old town lock up (c.1710), which is built in coursed squared rubble with very large delaminating face bedded quoins and a stone slate roof. The sandstone shows considerable colour variation from muddy grey/brown to dark rusty brown and the high degree of weathering of the ground floor shows that it is not very durable.
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| The old Town School and Sunday School |
Immediately to the west are two buildings listed for their group value, the early C18 old Town School and the early C19 old Sunday School, which was later used as the Parish Church Hall and as a printing works and the Horbury Civic Society have marked these with blue plaques.
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| Blue plaques |
In the part of Horbury that I had so far seen, there is no obvious evidence of it’s industrial history, but it is part of the Heavy Woollen District, which started as a cottage industry before rapidly developing after the Industrial Revolution. The 1854 edition of the Ordnance Survey map marks several mills operating near the River Calder, but there was still open countryside to the west of the old part of the town.
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| A detail of Horbury on the 1854 edition of the Ordnance Survey map |
