The town of Sowerby Bridge started life as a fording point over the River Calder, close to where it is joined by the River Ryburn. More so even than its neighbouring West Riding towns, it expanded during the Industrial Revolution, with water-powered textile mills erected around the bridge and the opening of the Rochdale Canal providing a route for transport by water over the Pennines. As such, most of its oldest buildings date from the nineteenth century rather than earlier.

The name Brighouse is derived from Bridge House, a self-explanatory reference to a building close to on or a bridge, and what is now a town was originally a hamlet in the ancient parish of Halifax. Surrounded by Huddersfield to the south, Halifax to the west, Bradford to the north, and Dewsbury to the east, it marks the first stopping point on a journey along the Calder Valley Line that will become progressively more scenic as it heads into the Pennines. Not that Brighouse is

Calderdale is the second Metropolitan Borough in modern-day West Yorkshire not to contain a city, being administered from Halifax, its largest town. Like Kirklees, it was formed in 1974. Named after the River Calder, it includes six main towns – in addition to Halifax, these are Brighouse, Elland, Sowerby Bridge, Hebden Bridge, and Todmorden. All of these bar Elland have a railway station on the Calder Valley Line, which connects Leeds and Bradford with Lancashire and is the

Ravensthorpe is a suburb of Dewsbury, formerly heavily industrialised and once boasting several textile mills. It is not an ancient...

The town of Mirfield forms part of the area’s Heavy Woollen District, having been a centre of the woollen industry from the fourteenth...