The Kirkburton Parish Council area was established as an Urban District in 1937, combining eight (originally nine) townships to the east of Huddersfield. Within the district are eleven villages: Farnley Tyas, Flockton, Grange Moor (officially in Whitley Upper township), Highburton (part of Kirkburton), Kirkburton itself, Kirkheaton, Lepton, Shelley, Shepley, Stocksmoor (part of Thurstonland township) and Thurstonland itself.
To celebrate the Queen’s 60th Jubilee in 2012 the Parish Council, with various other agencies, set up a project to create a series of ten walks centred on each community, and a series of leaflets with maps was produced. Each walk had the name of a former local personage for the title of the walk. For example, the Lepton walk features Anne Jessop (1850?-1941), daughter of Allen Jessop who established the first fireworks business in the village. The Kirkheaton walk remembers Elizabeth Drake, one of 17 girls who perished in a tragic fire at Atkinson’s Mill in Colne Bridge in 1818: they had been trapped upstairs.
And each walk had, at some point, a newly carved guide-stoop, modelled on the historic stoop at Farnley Moor, between Thurstonland and Farnley Tyas. As well as fingers pointing to the neighbouring villages each stoop also featured an item relating to the particular place. Thus the Grange Moor stoop shows the pit-head winding-gear at the local Shuttle Eye Colliery (closed in 1973).
Full details and pdfs of the walks can be found here.
Source: talks given at the Northern Spring Meeting of the Milestone Society, April 2013
RWH / revised May 2021
