SILSDEN CONSERVATION AREA
Historical Introduction
The historic core of Silsden is a linear development along a north-south street, on rising ground above the flood plains of the River Aire. It has been divided into two parts by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. At the top end of the main street the road forks and a 19th-century turnpike road climbs steeply to the north-east out of the town, across the moors to Addingham. Silsden Beck is formed by two streams which meet in the middle of the village close to a ford and above a large weir. South of the weir, the beck runs along the east side of the main street.
Historical development and changing character of the conservation area
Domesday Book of 1086 records Silsden as a large agricultural estate, assessed for tax purposes at nearly a thousand acres of arable land, and held by five 'thegns' or lesser landowners. Two of the thegns would have held the hamlets of Brunthwaite and Swartha; the rest probably had their lands in and around the present village. After the Norman conquest, all these lands came into the hands of the lords of Skipton Castle, who held them down to recent centuries; but the fundamental pattern of settlement in and around Silsden may still reflect the earlier divisions of property in Anglo-Saxon times.
The earliest building recorded in Silsden is the water-powered corn mill, which is south of the village core, within the southern end of the conservation area. It was given to Bolton Priory in the early 12th century. Its buildings have, of course, been reconstructed in more recent centuries, but the general layout of the water-courses may be of considerable antiquity. The village as a whole appears on an estate map of 1610 (YAS DD 174/1), but apart from the mill and a few other structures, it is shown conventionally and probably not very accurately. It seems, however, to indicate that the early 17th-century farming settlement occupied much the same area as it did in a more detailed map of 1757 (YAS DD 214), when there were about 25 farmsteads in the village, and on the mid-19th century first edition 6 inch OS map.
The map of 1757 indicates that the village had a composite plan, with several discrete elements. The bulk of the farmsteads lay on the west side of Silsden Beck, on the western frontage of the street now called Kirkgate, formerly Towngate. At the northern end was the second element or focus for settlement: a triangular green giving access to the north-east and north-west lanes leading out of the enclosed land, towards Silsden Moor; and a third group of farmsteads stretched from the green to Town Head, along the north-easterly lane. There were few properties on the east side of Kirkgate, and detailed studies suggest there may have been even fewer there in the early 16th century, perhaps only a property of the Knights Hospitaller. There were, however, clearly properties then along the sides of the green, towards Town Head and along the west side of Towngate.
The Towngate farmsteads are, perhaps, the most interesting, for the 19th-century OS map and that of 1757 both indicate that the boundaries of the crofts behind them are in some places sinuous, having the reversed S-shape which is characteristic of the ox-ploughed strips of land within medieval open fields. Since the sinuous boundaries run between the buildings right to the frontage, it is likely that these crofts were once part of the open fields, but were later taken out of cultivation to form the yards and crofts of a series of new farmsteads. The date of this development is unknown, but there are grounds for suggesting it took place in Anglo-Saxon times. Though many of these boundaries were erased during the expansion of industry and associated housing in the later 19th century, some can still be traced within the conservation area. One of the Towngate properties was described as a hall with a chapel. When recorded, in the late 17th century, it was held by Sir Edmund Jennings, on a lease from Skipton Castle. It has since been demolished. However, another hall, called the Old Hall, still stands on one of the lanes leading off the green. Though rebuilt in 1682, it was probably in existence in the Middle Ages, for it was recorded as a freehold property in the early 16th century.
Though the north-west corner of the conservation area, around the Old Hall, contains a scatter of 17th-century buildings, the character of the conservation area generally has been heavily moulded by Silsden's growth as a centre of crafts and industries in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of those industries was shoe manufacture, recorded as early as the beginning of the 18th century; it was presumably related to the tannery at Town Head, just outside the conservation area, where leather working is documented by 1740. Silsden also supported important nail and clog-iron industries in the 19th century. Nail manufacture, which emerged in the 18th century, employed over a hundred people at its peak in the mid-19th century. Finally, there was, inevitably, a significant textile industry, based initially upon flax grown locally. The earliest reference to a handloom industry based on processing flax is at the beginning of the 18th century. The first powered textile mill at Silsden was not constructed until the 1830s, and the only one within the current conservation area, Waterloo Mills was built along the side of the Leeds-Liverpool canal in the 1870s. This stretch of the canal was opened in 1772.
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