The Old Course Road

Gill has made a short film looking at The Old Course/ Corpse Road leading from Hebden Bridge to Heptonstall. You can view it here. A transcript of the film is below.

The Old Course Road, Hebden Bridge

Hi, I’m Gill and I work for the Local Studies and Information Team at Calderdale Libraries.

It’s six in the morning and I’m up in the woods near Hebden Bridge town. The Fox and Goose pub is just below me and behind, Mytholm and Bankfoot. The footpath I’m on might look like any other ordinary path, winding its way up the side of the hill, but it isn’t. This path, described on the Ordinance Survey map, published in 1850, as The Old Course Road, was used for a very particular purpose, and if we allow for local dialect, and take the word ‘course’ to mean  ‘corpse’ it becomes clear that this path, at some point in its history, was a corpse road.

 So, what is a corpse road? Well, for many centuries you couldn’t just bury your dead in any churchyard, you had to bury your dead in the churchyard of the Mother Church. This was the church decreed by canon law as the only church in your area that had burial rights. Saint John the Baptist, in Halifax, built around 1095, was such a church and provided for the whole parish, which, at 150 square miles, was the largest in England.

For a long time, churches with burial rights were few and far between. Why? Well, because it was a way for the Mother Church to exert maximum control over its flock, it also guaranteed maximum collection of revenues as well; to put it plainly, money and power.

So, if you lived in Hebden Bridge or Todmorden you had to take the recently departed all the way to Halifax to bury them and if you had money perhaps that wasn’t so bad because you may well have been able to afford a horse and cart, but if you were poor you had to physically carry that body all that way.

At some point in the late mediaeval period Thomas a Becket Church, in Heptonstall, acquired burial rights. Thomas a Becket was built between 1256 – 1260 and we know from the headstones in the old churchyard that they were burying people there at least as early as 1501.

So people living in the surrounding townships were very lucky indeed because from then on they no longer had to carry their dead all the way to Halifax, they could take them, via a much shorter route, to Heptonstall.

How were the parishioners going to get their coffins up the hill?

There were in fact two favoured routes. If you lived in Hebden Bridge town, or further east, you would process up the Buttress. This was the route the cortege of hanged Coiner, Thomas Spencer, took in 1783.

But what if you lived to the west of the town? This is where The Old Course Road enters the story.

It begins its ascent from Mytholm, near Bankfoot and curves up and around the side of the hill to Heptonstall, and even though it might not seem very road like now there is evidence of it having been designed for its purpose.

You can see that the road is about 7 to 8ft wide, which is just about wide enough to have people walking, two abreast, and carrying a coffin between them.

You can also still see in places that the road has been walled and embanked. This would have been to maintain an even gradient, as best as possible, for the ascent.

Now our road arrives at Lily Hall. I’m whispering because today it is a private residence and I don’t want to wake the current inhabitants up! It is here that the two routes to church, the Buttress route and this one, meet and continue up the hill together into Heptonstall village. Lily Hall was built around the late 18th to early 19th century. We don’t know if there was a building here prior to this, but the name ‘Lily Hall’ is certainly intriguing if we consider the flower’s association with death and funerals.

Why did the corpse road become so well established?

Perhaps, because of the sorrowful nature of the undertaking, this final journey took on an emotional and spiritual significance. Perhaps the ground they were walking on became hallowed in some way. For whatever reason, it is clear that corpse roads, of which there are many throughout northern Europe, became the customary and proper way to process to church.

In any case, once burial rights were granted more freely corpse ways fell into disuse, often losing their names – the only obvious indication of their important past.