PAUL France from Marsden was moved to write after he read about my reference to the small district of Nearfield on the border between Marsden and Slaithwaite.
That was where old chum Mike Shaw’s grandfather had a handsome three storey house on Manchester Road where the top floor was used to make rag rugs as a profitable business.
“My grandparents lived at the Olive Branch,” he says, the well known pub nearby.
“Mike’s father was a keen gardener and my grandmother used to send me to Harold Shaw to get a shilling’s worth of salad for Sunday tea. There was enough for about 10 of us.”
The building where the rag rugs were made was later used for heald and slay making, he says. And before anyone asks, these were essential parts of a weaving loom.
“A little story has always amused my simple mind about the area,’’ Paul adds. “It was how some residents of Marsden had to go to the next village to go to the toilet.”
By heck, you might think. A long walk on a cold night.
But the reason was that the cottages were on one side of a yard, beneath which ran Badger Brook, and the outside loos were on the other side of the yard. As Badger Brook was the boundary between Marsden and Slaithwaite, they lived in one village and went to the loo in the other.
