Exploring the Stories Hidden Beyond The Ruins

Beyond The Ruins, Watercolour on paper now available as a fine art print.

The route here lies on a line from Colne and Lancashire in one direction and Haworth and the Bronte Moors in another.

It was a freezing cold day, but a sunny one, and I was out looking for subject material to paint and exploring the ruins of Sunny Bank. One of my favourite places is out in the hills above Hebden Bridge, a market town set deep in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. Hebden Bridge is a hardy place, and it has survived a lot. It gets frequently weather beaten, was very nearly bulldozed to make way for modern life, and in recent history, has been subject to major flooding events, particularly a devastating flood on boxing day 2015. The town and its surrounding areas pretty much existed on farming and cloth manufacture up until the industrial revolution in the 19th Century.

High on the hillsides, handloom weavers would make cloth, usually woollens, in a spare room of their homes to sell in the local towns and the practice formed part or sometimes, all of their subsistence. It was a process that kept families fed until the industrial revolution took hold and forced people into the new factories in the valleys. Those whose livelihoods were threatened by this new mechanisation first complained to the government, then took the law into their own hands and set about the factories and their machines with hammers. There’s quite a bit of reading about these 18th Century struggles named the luddite riots and the difficulties that the changes brought to a simple existence.

looking through an old window of a tumbledown building

Exploring the saddened ruins of Sunny Bank

The buildings in this painting would have probably had a loom and maybe a spinning wheel too. There’s an old path running up beyond the ruins called a causey route (short for causeway), which was an old packhorse route, where trains of horses would carry goods such as salt, lime and coal from one place to another. The route here lies on a line from Colne and Lancashire in one direction and Haworth and the Bronte Moors in another. These routes are paved with huge stones called Causey stones, which are often rounded or hollowed from the action of time and the friction of boot and hoof. Ironically it would have been the same routes that took reluctant and starving weavers into the valley to work in the factories.

In a poetic sense they are following their one-time custodians from prosperity to demise, from hewn rock and sandstone bed, back to an earthy grave.

A typical packhorse route from the 18th Century made of large worn stones

In the painting, the scattering of stones that lay in the foreground are the remnants of a farm building halfway up the steep slope, but the one at the top hasn’t yet quite succumbed to the same demise. Used as an animal shelter for years it is marked on maps as ‘Nook’, but it’s known locally as ‘the house of shit’. It doesn’t take much to work out why when you go in but at least it has a roof. The hillside here is called sunny bank - bank because it is a very steep valley side and sunny because it faces Southeast. These places were built to make the most of the daylight way before electricity arrived.

There’s something organic about these buildings. They’re made from the land and they’re slowly returning to the land. In a poetic sense they are following their one-time custodians from prosperity to demise, from hewn rock and sandstone bed, back to an earthy grave. I loved exploring this composition, set directly amongst the process of all this history. The scattering of snow-covered stones led perfectly to the broken-down wall and beyond to Nook. The contrast of ice blues and deep oranges were just too tempting to ignore so I took a moment to sketch and to sit a while, pondering the stories and the life that these places once supported. These are the sorts of connections and elements that drive my work and fire my inspiration to paint.

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Beyond The Ruins, fine art print.

From£75.00

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Paul Talbot-Greaves RI, Artist, Author, Tutor

Paul Talbot-Greaves is a member of the Royal Institute Of Painters In Watercolours, and has been painting and writing for 30 years. He writes many articles for The Artist magazine (UK), has four practical art books published and has contributed to various others. He is represented by numerous galleries based around the North of England. He can be found on Instagram and Facebook where he regularly posts up to date pieces and inspirational stories.