Over a period of forty years Rochdale\nwas my home town, but for sixty three years Tadcaster has always been my place\nof birth. Now Rochdale, in the Lancashire foothills of the Pennines will always\nbe inextricably linked with my North Yorkshire birthplace because historians\nwill record how each town suffered dreadfully in the floods of December 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tadcaster is a small town with its\nelbows thrust out to keep apart York and Leeds, as it stands slab dab in the\nmiddle of the two. There\u2019s a by-pass these days but the bridge on the A64 remains\na narrow bottleneck creating havoc when traffic is busy heading to and from the\nchilly delights of Scarborough or the more refined air of York races. The road through\nTadcaster could never be sensibly widened cause of John Smith and Sam Smith,\nthe men who gave their names to the town\u2019s two massive brewery buildings that occupy\nterritories a wider road might otherwise run through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have vivid memories of standing on the\npavements of \u201cTad Bridge\u201d looking up the hill on the York side to the houses on\nthe Auster Bank estate where so many of my relatives lived, and to the riverside\nchurch in which my parents married. My dad would hold me up on the wall to look\ndown into the River Wharfe which, he told me, \u201cran red with blood during the\nwar of the roses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I didn\u2019t realise then that my dad was\nplaying fast and loose with local geography and mythologising history, so the\nriver became a source of fascination for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Recently, that proud 18th<\/sup>\ncentury stone bridge surrendered to the power of nature and as it collapsed\ninto the river it divided the town into two halves, with only diversions of\nseveral miles allowing the two parts to reconnect. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As I later watched the footage on You\nTube here in Lanzarote, of water pouring into The Butts I was reminded of Laura\nHodson, Project Officer for Revealing The Roch and her idea for a promotional\narts project inviting local writers to create a poem about an imagined meeting\nbetween any two characters from local history on Rochdale\u2019s medieval bridge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m left to ponder now that had there been\nno Tad Bridge in the nineteen forties, dad from Auster Bank, might never have\nmet mum, from the other side of the river. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over a period of forty years Rochdale was my home town, but for sixty three years Tadcaster has always been my place of birth. Now Rochdale, in the Lancashire foothills of the Pennines will always be inextricably linked with my North Yorkshire birthplace because historians will record how each town suffered dreadfully in the floods […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,4,3],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aata","tag-floods","tag-rochdale","tag-tadcaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}