Traces of Ancient Amidst the Modern

Life quickly gets embedded into a new pattern, usually based on the week that's just gone, rather than what could be.  That's as true for me as for the next person.  Recently, I've been well-supplied with WEBBS work that takes up free time quite easily because I enjoy it, leaving just enough for eating, sleeping and the daily contribution to my Welsh course.  Just lately, though, there has been a bit of a hold-up, while I wait for the remaining chapters of the book I'm working on to be finished.  So, what to do with the spare time?

Ordinarily, there would be little choice ... it would be family history.  However, with the recent burst of sunny and warmer weather - and knowing that, if the forecasts are right, it won't last long - I decided to go for a walk and explore my new-found home town.  After forty-odd years in rural Norfolk (albeit in a market town there) and twenty or so in the First Garden City, to move to an un-reconstituted former coal-mining town is, to say the least, something of a wrench.  Knowing that in my family tree there are people who moved out of East Anglia in the late 19th century, either to the cotton towns of Lancashire, or to the mining area of north Yorkshire and Durham, I've spent much of the last few months trying to imagine what this area was like a few decades ago with pit-head gear rising over every hill and round every corner.

Another aspect of this former age is the extent of the railway network.  Thanks to modern technology and the enthusiasts who utilise it, and in particular Rail Map online, I've discovered some of the strands of this network that provided transport for the coal produced nearby.  Even before moving here, I had realised that, like Letchworth, which I was leaving, this is a town divided by a railway.  Unlike Letchworth, this railway closed in the late 1970s and all that remains now is the deep cutting in which it ran.  This divides the town as firmly as if it still had trains running along it.

The Dearne Valley Railway was built in the Edwardian era, and opened in 1909 almost exclusively to service the local mines: passenger services began in 1912 but survived only until 1951.  A modern housing estate is now being developed on the site of a mine that was just the other side of the main road close to where I live.  The result is that, by walking less than half-a-mile, through this new development, I can find a modern footbridge that crosses the route of the former railway.  It gave me access earlier this week to the old track-bed and I offer below pictures of some relics I found there.