The Effects of Enclosure on Ancient Roads: A Case Study of Weeton Township, Lower Wharfedale

Abstract

In the eighteenth century there were close manufacturing and trade ties between Otley and Knaresborough. The principal route linking the two towns along the Wharfe valley had run through Weeton township since medieval times, and was joined there by another well-established road from Bradford and Leeds to the north. Despite the importance of these routes, they had not been improved when many other major routes in Yorkshire were turnpiked in the 1750s. When parliamentary enclosure came to Weeton, in 1793, the enclosure commissioners took the opportunity to abandon the ancient routes. Their new roads, with easy gradients, improved communications with neighbouring parishes as well as with Otley and Knaresborough. Although a new turnpike road along the Wharfe valley was built nearly fifty years later, the road network put in place by the enclosure award has remained essentially unchanged to this day.

Keywords:

• Enclosure
• Roads
• Weeton
• Otley
• Knaresborough

I am grateful to the YAJ editor and an anonymous referee, and to Mr Gordon Forster, for their helpful advice and suggestions. My thanks are owed also to the staff of West Yorkshire Archive Service (Wakefield and Leeds) and of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society archives, whose welcome and assistance made this research a pleasure. Parts of the Weeton enclosure plan are reproduced by kind permission of West Yorkshire Archive Service.

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Notes on contributors

Roger Davis

Roger Davis retired in 2000 as Deputy Librarian of Leeds University Library. His main research interests are bibliographical. As well as brief articles based on items in the Library’s collections, he has published a book on the early nineteenth-century York printer James Kendrew.