Wells Bottom Farm
A Memory of Ripponden.
As children, my two brothers and I would go to visit Nannan (my paternal grandmother) at Wells Bottom Farm, near Sowerby Bridge, Ripponden. We would stop at the Blue Bell Inn for a drink of pop, the highlight of the long car ride from Oldham. When I look up her name - Gaukroger, I see that there was many of that name in and around there.
Wells Bottom Farm, had the main house two cottages attached and a dark old barn on the other side. We kids would stay with Nannan for a week and some of my fondest memories are of the greengrocer's van coming down the lane once a week. He had a son, young like us and that boy would throw apples at us from the back of the van as we ran chasing it.
A mile or so up the road was another house, where if you went around the back door you would find a little sweet shop. A cranky old lady would serve us sherbert and a liquorice stick ....no smile, we thought she was witch in disguise.
There was a stream we would go paddling in, and it seemed to be far from anywhere after industrial Oldham area. Dogs, cats, kittens all around, cows and mice, we loved it.
As an adult I now live in California but still go to Yorkshire when I go home, I love the people. Bronte Land is my favorite place to visit.
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We moved there, I remember when we first arrived at the house the cottages which had not been lived in for many years there was a dead Owl on the floor of the first cottage that had turned green in colour, we lived in a caravan at the back of the house for nearly three years, my father got a digger and dumper and dug out tons of earth out at the back of the house and had to pull down the cottages accept for the front wall and rebuild we had a part time builder called Stephen Doyle who I remember had a Ford Anglia van.
Me my older brother Grant and my younger sister Lisa were sent to school at Millbank junior and infants, buses were every two hours and did not always turn up, you then had to walk to school, the farm up at the top of the unmade track at the gable end was called Far Slack Farm owned by Cyril Wilkinson who had quite a few children two quite a lot older than me which were Alan and another sister, I remember Janice Christine Susan and David who were more around my age, Buckley's was the next farm down, they had children called Geraldine and Stephen I always remember sacks in the wells of the farms these were, I later found out were new born kittens, the house straight down Blue ball road which was also a shop was run by Mrs Atkinson who at this time was an old lady, her son was called Kenneth and was an agricultural engineer fixing tractors, plough's muck spreaders cars anything he rewired Wells Bottom Farm.
I went to Ryburn inSowerby my Brother and sister went to Sowerby Bridge Grammar, I was more practical and chose Ryburn as they had metalwork and other useful skills being taught.
The Beehive pub was my local but I had a friend Russel White whose mother had the Alma Inn at Cotton Stones so used to visit there, he was killed two years ago on canal road in Bradford on his motorbike after a women who had been texting, turned across his path
I used to walk on the moors for hours, I could type for hours on this episode of my life, my parents moved to Peel house in Gomersal in 1978 buying another house which wanted extensive renovation, thank you Angela for rekindling old memories.
Greg Burrows Dewsbury