“It’s something that is just there,” is a perfectly acceptable explanation, but it nags at me that something must have put it there in the first place. 

     I suppose my father is to blame. We lived in Todmorden, a place then that was all grimy mills and terraced rows, the marshy valley of the fox, it means. It’s actually three deep narrow valleys and in the middle where they meet is the town centre. The rest of the town lines each of the valley bottoms – one to Halifax, one to Rochdale and the third to Burnley. It grew as the cotton industry grew. People, like my ancestors, moved from small farmsteads and their cottage industries on the hilltops at places like Blackshawhead down to the mills that grew and filled the valleys.
    
     It was not a pretty place in those days and far from pleasant. Only now when the mills have been demolished and old terraced back to backs replaced by more pleasing developments and open greener spaces has the place taken on a more picturesque appearance. The craggy hilltops and the desolate moors rolling on for miles and miles always have been beautiful and majestic. The roads, the canal, the river and the railway are still there, the latter ‘only just’ as its importance declines. And the canal is there for leisure.

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