After the deluge

Last year the heavens opened in the Calder Valley, the area is very much back in business.

chic. It has been described as modern and stylish in an unconventional way, but I can’t see that.

What I can see is a small town that is as much a delight to visit as chancing upon a village in the Pyrenees after driving around in the hills. Hebden Bridge is one of those places that when you see the packhorse bridge, dating back to 1510, that gives the town its name you cannot fail to be transported back into the time when this was the main thoroughfare for cloth and food; and when you see the canal with its brightly coloured longboats there is a very real sense of this being a holiday destination.

In an independent poll it was rated the fourth “quirkiest” place to live in the world, but the locals can’t have been best pleased with the word and have latched on to it being “funkiest”.

Quirky should not be seen as a derogatory term for the town, after all it has one of the quirkiest types of buildings anywhere in the UK due to its steep setting. They are called “top and bottom” houses and often have four floors, but the house is divided into two with the bottom two floors having a doorway out to the road and the top two floors having a doorway out of the back. These are not conventional townhouses.

Just a mile and a half to the east of Hebden Bridge is Mytholmroyd – home of clogs and the birthplace of former poet laureate Ted Hughes.

Hughes only lived here until he was seven years of age, at No.1 Aspinall Street, but his memory lives on in the town thanks