Burn Bridge
| Burn Bridge | |
|---|---|
 Cottages on Spring Lane | |
| Population | Expression error: "5,545[1]" must be numeric |
| OS grid reference | SE300515 |
| Civil parish | |
| District | |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | HARROGATE |
| Postcode district | HG3 |
| Dialling code | 01423 |
| Police | North Yorkshire |
| Fire | North Yorkshire |
| Ambulance | Yorkshire |
| UK Parliament | |
| Website | Burn Bridge included in Pannal website |
Burn Bridge is a village in the borough of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England.
Burn Bridge is set largely on the side of a hill. The small river Crimple Beck runs through the lower area. Burn Bridge plays host to Pannal Cricket Club and the Black Swan pub.
About the village
Name and community centre
It has been suggested that Burn Bridge could have been so named after a fire destroyed the bridge in earlier times;[3][4] it could equally have been named after the burn, or beck which runs along its southern edge. The nearest shop, school and church are at the adjacent village of Pannal. The village's only community centre is the Black Swan pub, so its Fifth of November gatherings and other annual celebrations tend to take place in the pub garden,[5] apart from the August bank holiday gala which takes place at Pannal Cricket Ground. A mobile library visits Westminster Drive for 10 minutes and Spring Lane for 20 minutes every few weeks.[6]
Residents and surroundings
This village is now mainly a dormitory for Harrogate workers, a few Menwith Hill employees and many retired people. To the west is mostly pasture land with sheep and cattle. There are two riding stables in the area. To the east is Pannal which expanded, when Crimple Meadows was built in the 1970s, to the point at which it would have joined with Burn Bridge. A condition on building permission for Crimple Meadows was that there would be only a footpath and no roads, between the two villages, to maintain their separate identities.[7]
Public transport
The only public transport serving this village is the 110 Harrogate & District village bus to Harrogate at two-hourly intervals on weekdays; fewer on Saturdays. Otherwise the nearest bus route is the 36 between Leeds and Ripon, via Pannal and Harrogate. Pannal railway station is the nearest rail link, providing trains to Leeds, and to York via Harrogate, at half-hourly intervals Monday to Saturday; less frequently on Sundays.
The Black Swan pub
Its local name is the Mucky Duck. Apparently there has been a hostelry on the site since charcoal burners used it in ca.1650.[3][4] Opposite the pub on Burnbridge Road was the smithy, later a grocer's shop until the 1960s and now converted to an office.[8]
The Westminster estate
This estate, known locally as the Westminsters, contains some houses built in the 1920s. It was expanded by 147 houses in the 1950s, and 161 more were added by George Wimpey in ca.1975,[8] on a slope where there were once drystone-walled pastures and a small wood. In Westminster Drive there are the two last remaining thatched houses in the area, and a Victorian house built before 1860, which was once called The Horst.[3]
Allan Wood
This little bluebell wood forms the boundary between Burn Bridge and Pannal Recreation Ground. Originally a commercial planting of softwood, it is now owned by Harrogate Borough Council which maintains it as a local amenity, and is in the process of gradually re-planting it with indigenous trees.[9]
Malthouse Lane
This marks the southern edge of the Burn Bridge settlement, and runs alongside Crimple Beck.
Malthouse Lane courtyard and milldam
There were mills on the site next to Malthouse Lane bridge from the 14th century.[3] The corn mill nearest to the bridge backed onto the milldam, and housed the water wheel. Now converted to housing, it still contains the original wooden bevel gears which were driven by the water wheel. The milldam was fed from Crimple Beck via a goit upstream, and the water ran off via a culvert under the corn mill and returned to the stream near Malthouse Lane bridge. The milldam was drained ca.1975 and is now a wildlife preserve under a woodland preservation order. Fauna such as woodpeckers and willow warblers are colonizing this site.
The Victorian house between the courtyard and Pannal Cricket Ground is Bridge House, which was once the farm house of Thomas Hudson, who owned much of the local land to the south of Crimple Beck. His barn stands on the other side of the cricket ground, and is now converted to housing. The barn had cow byres and stables behind. The circular stone wing still exists, where the horses turned the grinding mill for the corn.
The malthouse
The malthouse was built on farmland nearby, in what is now Malthouse Lane. The malthouse was built ca.1876 by farmer Thomas Hudson, who bought the land for the purpose in that year from landowner Eliza Penelope Bentley of Pannal Hall.[10] Wagons brought coal and barley from a railway siding whose remaining containing wall for the coal can still be seen by the Harrogate Line. The malthouse was demolished in 1975, but the malthouse manager's house remains.[3] The cobbled yard of that house was the malthouse coalyard, and steps once led down from the coalyard to the boiler room and river. Four houses, built in 1975, now stand on the malthouse site.
Rose Cottage
Crimple Beck, the house opposite the malthouse which was previously called Rose Cottage, was built before 1840[11] as a single-storey building. It was extended and raised to two storeys in the 1970s, probably re-using sandstone blocks from the demolished malthouse.
Crimple Beck
Some reaches of this river which passes through Burn Bridge are protected with associated SSSIs and SINCs, and freshwater fish and crayfish are protected under various Acts.[12] The river does have a history of mink predating other animals, but there are still mallards, moorhens, herons, kingfishers and grey wagtails, besides more common birds.
Flooding history
Around the Crimple Beck area, at the bottom of the hill, there have been several floods in living memory. The 1940s flood rose to about a yard deep in Malthouse Lane due to a river-wall collapse downstream.[13] Later there were two very shallow floods: the first in the 1980s when a householder's building works temporarily dammed the beck downstream, and the second in the 1990s when the storm drain carrying water from the Westminster estate became blocked where it ran under a house in Malthouse Lane, and the water had to find other routes to the beck.[14] These faults were corrected. Finally in June 2007 there was a one-foot-deep flood in the area after a major but temporary gas-pipeline-laying operation further upstream encouraged sudden, fast drainage across acres of bare earth into the river after heavy storms, and the beck ran too full for the first time.[15][16]
Brackenthwaite Lane
Close to where Brackenthwaite Lane joins Burnbridge Road was a long, narrow thatched house in which the Dennison family of farmworkers brought up their 21 children. The site is now part of the garden of Norfolk House.[3]
Future building development
This village is bordered on the south and west sides by pasture, which has been at intervals identified as a greenfield site[17] by town planners. This is possibly because there is Burn Bridge or Pannal on one side of these fields and, in the distance, a main road on the other side. So far, the Pannal Village Society, local residents and certain town councillors have successfully argued against these plans, on the grounds that the village is already too much urbanised for a rural area with no official community centre of its own. It has also been suggested that Burn Bridge Road is already heavily used by commuters to and from Harrogate, such that speed-control measures have been built into the road. Already it is unsafe to walk from Burn Bridge via Burnbridge Road to the bus stop on the Leeds-Harrogate road during the rush hour, as Burnbridge Road is narrow and has many corners, roadside ditches and no footpath.[14] Recent official suggestions about sites, given by town planners, are here.
References
- ^ Pannal Ward, Census 2001
- ^ Harrogate area, Census 2001
- ^ a b c d e f Information from Postcards from Pannal by Anne Smith (Self-published by Anne Smith, Harrogate. Undated; ca.2000).
- ^ a b Ancestry.com: historical photos of the previous Black Swan building.
- ^ York Press: Mention of Bonfire Night at Black Swan.
- ^ Times are given here, updated regularly.
- ^ Pannal News, Monday, March 31, 2008
- ^ a b Pannal News site, Monday, April 14, 2008
- ^ Information from Council parks department.
- ^ Information from UK Land Registry. NB: The information in Postcards from Pannal is incorrect here.
- ^ It is marked on the 1840 inch map of the area. A copy of the map is held at the Victoria Library in Harrogate.
- ^ Harrogate.gov.uk: Flowing water objective.
- ^ Information from former malthouse foreman.
- ^ a b Information from residents.
- ^ Youtube: 2007 flood at Burn Bridge.
- ^ Floods.co.uk: Flood video from Burn Bridge.
- ^ i.e. a potential site for housing developments.
External links
- Map sources for Burn Bridge
- Pannal website which includes Burn Bridge
- Harrogate Ringway walk map and images
- 1895 map showing Malthouse Lane bridge and courtyard at bottom left. Bridge House is there, with the zig-zag-shaped old corn mill just to the north-west of it (unnamed). The building just to the north-east of Bridge House was a malthouse as the map says, and within living memory was a dog food factory. All have been coverted to housing. The red-marked building on the north side of the river was Hudson's malthouse, now demolished, in what is now Malthouse Lane.
- Multimap of Burn Bridge, indicating the Black Swan. Burn Bridge now comprises the western side of the conurbation with Pannal. Burn Bridge includes the Westminsters, Malthouse Lane, Burn Bridge Road, Hazel Drive, the western part of Spring Lane, Hill Foot Lane and the eastern part of Brackenthwaite Lane.
- Harrogate Borough Council
- Harrogate Advertiser, local newspaper