Why was stoodley pike built

Sowerby Bridge Shire Cruisers. See all locations. Cragg Vale. Arrow Back. Todmorden Stoodley Pike Monument. Information on Stoodley Pike Monument. Attraction type:. You may also like For a while it looked as if I might have to, as my year hold on an increasingly expensive London began to feel untenable.

Just as new towers rose and glowed in the light-polluted sky, so many of my favourite haunts and dark places off the narrow were obliterated. The city has become bland, its hectic energy stifled. Might this be the moment to renege on the Faustian pact that anyone who embraces city life must make? This May, I got off at the same station, but struck out south across the moors down towards Hebden.

At first, the going was heavy. London life is easy on the feet, but these long, steady ascents soon twisted the breath tight in my throat as the bright and hideous rucksack that held my tent and clothes for the weekend creaked on my back. The day was unexpectedly hot, my bottle nearly empty and my olive army surplus top sweat-soaked.

On the OS map, a blue pint pot in Lothersdale offered relief. At the bar, decorated with little save a picture of Paul Weller, I asked for a pint of lime and soda.

I gulped at the water furiously, a carbonated fusillade clearing my thick tongue. Refreshed, yet perplexed by a Dour Yorkshireman encounter straight out of Central Casting, I struggled up steps set into the far side of the valley. A lady sat outside her cottage told me that on the previous weekend walkers had trudged past through a blizzard. Indeed — I was starting to realise that my adult mind had outgrown the chaotic impressions its younger self had made of the moors. Dotted around alongside the Pennine Way are unofficial sculptures, bathtubs full of flowers and shrubs protected from grazing by thick mesh, a red diesel barrel in an old stone trough.

Yet this haphazard appearance is an illusion, for however open the moors might seem, this landscape is one of boundaries. Long fences hummed, a black bin bag streaming from a garland of barbed wire. At one ruined farm a half-rotted hare peered out from underneath a wooden door without catch or lock, as if it had been put there as a warning. Most striking were the walls that cross the moors in lines as straight as the white scores the jets of my childhood left in the sky. There is evidence to suggest that some sort of structure existed on the site even before the earlier structure was built.

The monument is located approximately 2 miles south west of Hebden Bridge and approximately 2. Stoodley Pike Monument contains a spiral staircase of 39 steps, accessed from its north side. During repairs in a grille was added to the top step, allowing more light in, so that only 6 or 7 steps are in darkness. There are no windows. The entrance to the balcony, the highest point that can be reached, and some 40 feet above ground level, is on the west face.

Just below it on the contour shelf at roughly metres lies the Harvelin Park housing estate. From here walkers can enjoy an easy minute walk to the Pike. Source: Rgclegg at the English language Wikipedia. It is noted for the foot Stoodley Pike Monument at its summit, which dominates the moors of the upper Calder Valley and the market town of Todmorden.

The monument is near the villages of Mankinholes and Lumbutts, West Yorkshire, and was designed in by local architect James Green, and completed in at the end of the Crimean War. The monument replaced an earlier structure, started in and commemorating the defeat of Napoleon and the surrender of Paris. It was completed in , after the Battle of Waterloo , but collapsed in after an earlier lightning strike, and decades of weathering.