Nature Diary Rocks History Gallery Home Page    A DULL DAY ON THE Ring Road through the southern fringes of the city. At the Tong Road traffic lights, there's a glimpse of wildfowl on an old mill dam. A couple of ponies graze amongst the thorn trees on Silver Royd Hill above Wortley Beck. A few Black-headed Gulls stand on the short-mown grass of a traffic island. Only traces of the 'black' (actually chocolate brown) plumage on their heads remain. These fragments of the original countryside are now embedded in amongst housing estates, retail outlets and the occasional factory. Upstream from the mill dam, my old A to Z of the city shows Hare Park Farm where there is now a little housing estate and a MacDonalds. Gamble Hill, Swallow Hill and Mount Pleasant, which are now almost entirely under housing, overlook the valley here. Their names conjour up a picture of the countryside before the Industrial Revolution and subsequent baby booms. But you can still get an impression of what it must have been like by driving a few miles along the road to Tong, a stone built village that survives in an enclave of open country between Leeds and Bradford.
Richard Bell, |
