...Just like being back at school, isn't it?

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HISTORY

 

​The Brooke family, which owns the woods, traces its involvement in woollen manufacture back to Henry VIII's time, when Roger Brooke inherited land at New Mill and his son John leased a fulling mill there in 1541. 

The increasing volume of business meant bigger mills, and since these buildings were reliant on water power, it was inevitable that the Brookes would seek more and more powerful sources.  This meant moving down the valley, stage by stage.
They moved first from New Mill to Honley and later, for the final stage of their expansion, to Armitage Bridge. The entire valley from the western rim of Magdale to the Dean Brook, which runs down from Netherton, became Brooke land.  This includes 60 acres of woodland and an amount of tenanted pasture and farmland. It was bought in 1798 for £10,000 and the majority of the mill buildings were operating by 1819.
William Brooke built a home for himself and his family at Northgate House, Honley, and this was still occupied by them when John Brooke, his son, built himself Armitage Bridge House in the water meadows beside the River Holme in 1828. Cream-coloured sandstone for this house was quarried from Mag Wood, and the spoil built into a barrier to protect the house from the quarry's visual and aural impact. Another, much smaller quarry, was dug to build the mill race and its retaining walls.

Armitage Bridge Mills were originally powered by three 25ft diameter waterwheels, running from water supplied along a goyt or mill race that leaves the Holme about half a mile upstream from the mill and passes beneath Mag Wood to feed the topside or south-west of the mill. The wheels have gone but the mill race until recently supplied water for two 75hp water turbines, which generated about a third of the mill's power. It is expected that these will soon be replaced by a much more efficient Archimedes Screw-type hydropower unit, which could deliver two thirds of the present mill's occupiers' electricity.

 

The main route up into the woodlands from Bank Foot Lane is a former quarry access  road, now a  footpath, which starts just north of Magwood House and  joins Hawkroyd Bank Road, Netherton half a mile further on. The quarry from which was extracted the stone to build Armitage Bridge House and its gatehouse in the 1820s is half way up on the right. There are, much overgrown, the signs of at least two other small quarries carved from the steep slopes down to the River Holme, and numerous signs of water management works, also now disused.