A flying visit

Before my holiday, I paid a flying visit to the village of Kildwick, a few miles up the valley from Saltaire. It was a roasting hot, sunny day so I only took a short walk. The village hugs the banks of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, although higher up the hill is a fine Jacobean manor house called Kildwick Hall, built in 1642 and in private ownership.

It is a nice little village, mostly residential properties, with a good pub and a large church. The village has historic links to the priory at Bolton Abbey. Below the village, in the valley bottom, the main road from Keighley to Skipton crosses the River Aire and in the 1300s Bolton Priory paid for a stone bridge to be constructed here, the oldest stone bridge in Airedale. (It's not the one in my photo, which is a canal bridge.) The bridge still stands at the entrance to the village, though the main road has since been diverted onto a bypass to avoid the bottleneck that the village became.

This stretch of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal from Bingley to Skipton was the first section to be completed, in 1773.