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| A sign at Batley railway station |
Following on from my brief visit to the village of Wortley, principally to see Wortley Hall and St. Leonard’s church, my next day out on the buses and trains was to explore Batley and Birstall in West Yorkshire - on the second Saturday of the Heritage Open Days (HOD) festival.
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| The locations of Treeton and Birstall |
In previous years, I had made a considerable effort to travel far to visit one of the mediaeval churches that opened its doors - Barwick-in-Elmet, Scarcliffe, Methley, Ault Hucknall, Whitkirk and Kirkthorpe - but it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify my travel time to remote villages, where the buses often only run every 2 hours.
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| A British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge for Batley and Birstall |
On this occasion, I was aware that Batley Library and the Grade II* listed St. Peter’s church was open for HOD and that a British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge would give me a good reason to further explore the textile producing towns of West Yorkshire – as I had done earlier in the year at Morley, Halifax and Huddersfield.
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| An extract from the No. 201 bus timetable |
As I was becoming increasingly aware of, a day out on the buses and trains from Treeton – which has been described as a “downtrodden backwater” and “the forgotten village” and the bus services have been cut to the bone – had started to take a lot of organising. Although I had caught a train to Leeds and then a bus to my final destination several times before, the No. 201 bus takes an hour to get to Batley and I therefore decided to catch another train at Leeds railway station.
Having established the quickest way to get to Batley, albeit not covered by my travel pass, the next step was to plan a route from Batley and Birstall, where several properties had appeared in the postcode search for my Photo Challenge, but were located some distance from St. Peter’s church.
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| The topography around Batley and Birstall |
Although only a short distance between Birtley and Birstall as the crow flies, looking at the topographic map, these listed buildings are spread across a valley formed by a tributary of the River Calder and a walk up to the Bagshaw Museum required a walk up an escarpment formed by the Emley Rock – at an elevation 65 m higher than the entrance to Wilton Park on Bradford Road.
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| An extract from the No. 283 bus timetable |
Whilst in the area, I also planned to visit Batley Cemetery to continue a personal project to photograph some of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstones, which had regimental crests that I had not seen before, so I thought it best to catch the No. 283 bus from Batley to Birstall - to reduce the stress on my ageing knees on what would be a long day out.
As with many trips to cemeteries to find these CWGC headstones, I started by downloading an Excel spreadsheet from their website before editing into a format that I could include in my worksheet for the day. Very often, those headstones on the CWGC website are actually non standard memorials and, to eliminate these, I used the War Graves Photographic Project website and finally found a plot plan to help me find those on my list.
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| The plot plan for Batley Cemetery |
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