Farndale and Rosedale

No one today would ever guess that peaceful and rural Rosedale, in the North York Moors, was once the site of an iron mining industry, belching out thick smoke over the moors. Trains were running from Rosedale over Blakey Junction to Ingleby’s Incline, where the carts were hauled down a steep tramway, and transported further to Newcastle and the North. The mines were closed in the 1920s, and today, nothing remains of this industrial past but ruins (visible in the centre of the photo), and the former railroad bed, now used as a footpath all along Rosedale. (Images from Rosedale's railroading past at http://web.onyxnet.co.uk/Auffret-onyxnet.co.uk/railways/gall_frame.htm)

With a group of students, we took the bus to see the Daffodils bloom in Farndale (a popular outing in the Spring for many locals), and from there we hiked over Blakey Ridge, to Rosedale. The daffodils were not yet at their peak (one can hardly imagine the crowd here when they are!), but the walk along the River Dove was very pleasant. But the spectacular part was hiking over the high moors to Rosedale, and back over Sherriff’s Pit, also the site of a former iron mine. There were some spectacular views of Rosedale along the way (pictures below).

Yorkshire’s Industrial Past.

The excursions we organize for our Calvin class are not just trips into the idyllic English country side or to England’s most beautiful places. Yorkshire has a rich industrial past, and the first "dark satanic mills" were built in the steep valleys of West Yorkshire. Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived for most of their lives in their father’s parsonage (fotos above), was perhaps a fairly remote place, at the edge of the Moors (certainly before the coming of the railway, today a scenic steam railway to the not-so-scenic city of Keighley, fotos below). But in 1830, Haworth already had a population of 3,000, and several mills. The living conditions in nineteenth-century Haworth must have been miserable, with dismal sanitary conditions and a high mortality rate, due to tuberculosis and cholera.

Not all mill owners were insensitive to the worker’s conditions. In 1853, multimillionair mill owner Titus Salt from Bradford decided to found the the nearby village of Saltaire. He built a gigantic mill in Italianate style, equipped it with the latest green technology (a smoke-reducing steam engine of his own patented design), and built a model village for his workers right next to it. Today, Salt’s Mill is no longer a working Mill, but it houses a museum, gallery, and several fancy shops, including an early music story. But the mill and the village (fotos) still stand as a monument to Salt’s Utopian vision, which, incidentally, proved to be financially profitable as well.

Our guide, Roger Clarke, dressed up as a nineteenth-century presbyterian minister, showed the Calvin College group around Saltaire’s United Reformed Church, quite an exuberant building for a Calvinist church. To the right, a bust of Titus Salt in one of the mill's galleries, which also contained paintings by David Hockney.

From West Yorkshire, coal was transported to the coast by canals, and later railroads. Many canals ended in Goole, where the coals vessels (called "tom puddings") were loaded onto larger ships. The Goole Waterways Museum preserves the memory of this recent past; the last tugboats pulled the tom puddings from West Yorkshire to Goole in the 1980s, when Thatcher closed down the British coal mining industry. Our excursion included a tugboat ride (the students had as much fun steering the boat as Kees and Thomas) and explanations by our expert guide, the former skipper of one of these tugboats.

Our students.

From following this blog so far, one might get the impression that we're on an extended holiday here in York. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Kate and I are teaching two courses, one on British culture (with an emphasis on literature, history, and current events), and one on British Church history, from the beginnings through the Reformation. And most of our Wednesdays and Saturdays, we have organized excursions for our group of twenty Calvin students, to show them the places we have discussed in class. Here are a few group pictures I took on two of those excursions: in Lindisfarne on the left, and Rievaulx Abbey on the right. We have a group of students we can be really proud of, and the enthusiasm they show for this semester is heart-warming.