Ovenden, near Halifax

On the 13^th of October 1763, Nathaniel John Priestley of Ovenden, aged 22, married Susannah Wadsworth, also of Ovenden, at Halifax Parish Church. Though this is still a mystery to be fully unravelled, it is also how we found ourselves looking for the site of Ovenden’s former station.

Ovenden is on the edge of Halifax, and the line built by the Halifax and Ovenden Joint Railway included a wooden station building there in 1881, on the route to Queensbury and Bradford. The station eventually closed in 1951, though through traffic continued for another 9 years after that. Information on the admirable Disused Stations website meant that tracking down the former station’s location was fairly straightforward, though the amount of foliage that has grown up around it since the 1930s is somewhat dramatic. Accessed from Old Lane just off the A629, the construction still stands – just about - as the offices and stores for the scrapyard that now occupies the site. A small section of the concrete northern-bound platform also remains.

A little further up the main road is Holdsworth House, an historic yet welcoming and comfortable hotel, which for two centuries of its lengthy past was the home of the Wadsworth family. Whether this is just a coincidence as far as our branch of the Priestleys is concerned also remains to be confirmed. What we can be sure about, is that the Beatles stayed here in October 1964, after a performance in Bradford.

The next day we visited Shibden Hall, another ancient stone-built country house and the former home of Anne Lister, whose fascinating life has been the subject of the television series, Gentleman Jack. Though investing in both coal mining and canals, Anne Lister apparently did not welcome the railway age, even though this same line from Halifax to Bradford would eventually tunnel beneath her land but not until some four decades after her death in 1840.