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Today we finally visited the Mill of the Black Monks, said to be the oldest pub in England. It suffered in the floods of last year and only reopened about five weeks ago. It was a mill, one of the commercial ventures operated by the Monks from the nearby monk Bretton Priory. King Stephen gifted the land and the mill to the Cluniac Monks in the very early twelfth century, so it was operating as a mill before that. A history of the mill and the priory and the interactions with various monarchs, which includes the history of the priory, is on display.
Luckily the floors for the public were not affected by the floods but the downstairs kitchens and other rooms were completely inundated. The ceilings and doorways are low, with enormous wood beams looking like they have at least another thousand years of strength in them to hold up the mill. Upstairs there was more seating under the rafters and some old mill scales and an ancient churn, reminding patrons of the pub’s earlier incarnation. We had a cup of coffee and chatted to the new manager, who was very friendly and relaxed, despite the hectic time they had been through in preparing the pub for re-opening and operation.
We are becoming very familiar with the footpath beyond the mill, so we strode out quickly towards Hoyle Mill, where we left the path and walked up through what was once a village and is now an inner suburb of Barnsley. We walked around the primary school grounds and looked at the buildings and the playground. Part of the grounds was for staff car parking and it and most of the small areas for playing were asphalt. It was then that I noticed that there was a large sign saying that the grounds were under video surveillance, so I hoped that I wouldn’t hear sirens approaching as we retraced our steps up the long driveway. People tell us that Britain has more video surveillance cameras in public places than anywhere else in the world.
This end of Barnsley has a much more hemmed-in feel, with many small, tall houses lining the road and tunnelling the walker along to the intersections. We spent a couple of hours in the Barnsley cemetery, which was established in the 1850s, but tricked us into thinking it was older because of the beautiful arcading and the entry that suggested an old priory. 
Here again we found so many families had lost so many children. Mine disasters had taken some people but the number of young men and women who died in their teens and twenties was still a puzzle to me. Later Graeme explained about the diseases connected to poverty, the terrible, crowded living conditions that people lived in, the lack of knowledge about basic hygiene and the lack of facilities to achieve it and the diseases that were once deadly, such as measles, which immunisations have virtually eliminated. TB, then known as consumption, was a major killer, and many people suffered from malnutrition to some degree, weakening their systems when other factors came into play. Add to that the diseases caused by working in mines and it was beginning to seem as if praise should be given for survival at all. We are not talking about the dark ages, but a time when our great grandparents lived, and since then sewage systems, sanitary systems, working conditions, advances in health knowledge and medicine and the welfare system have increased the age of life expectancy by twenty or thirty years. Infant mortality is a small fraction of what it used to be, with premature babies being saved, caesareans being performed and mothers not dying so often in childbirth.
Maureen met us and took us for a tour in her car to Cawthorne, the village we had missed out seeing on Wednesday. It is a charming village off the main road, the sort of place that the ‘Midsomer Murders’ TV program could have been set in. A lane leads up to a bit of a square at the gate to the old All Saints Church, where the oldest part of the building has been added to over the centuries. It seemed a sacrilege to us to have used the most ancient of their tombstones for paving for the path around the church, with busy traffic areas being impossible to read. We were to learn over our travels that anything useful for building was not considered sacred to an era or purpose once its original setting was destroyed or had fallen into disrepair, so at least these old fallen tombstones had remained in the church yard, rather than becoming part of a barn wall elsewhere.
A large, austere tomb resembling a bomb shelter, seemingly without a door or entry but probably with one in the top, took over a whole corner of the church yard and was the final resting place for the Spencer-Stanhope family from Cannon Hall. 
Next door a field held more recent graves running down the hill amongst the wildflowers. As we left an old lady and a little boy of about four stopped by a very old grave that had an open circle of stone at the top of the gravestone. Obviously locals out for a walk, the grandmother reminded the little boy that this was the grave where the baby was buried. He said he remembered because there was its toy, meaning the stone that looked like it had a baby’s rattle on the top.
A lady had been working in her perfect garden, keeping a Miss Marple like eye on the goings on in the church yard and the strangers in the village. She greeted us cheerily as we walked by, examining and adjusting the blooms on the rose bush that had acted as an inadequate screen for her.
The village is just about perfect, so naturally I looked around for a place to live in, settling on a very old house attached to the post office. The museum was closed but that was definitely something that we would have enjoyed visiting. We wandered around, past Holly Cottage, behind some gardens to try and view Cannon Hall, and around the Cawthorne Methodist Church, which has a façade like a two dimensional film set and a plain and functional building behind.
No-one was out and about apart, from some boys playing, so I did not meet any of the Wives of Cawthorne who had so thoughtfully placed their town name at the entrance.
The rest of the trip was spent in driving through the countryside to look at the neighbouring village of Silkstone, where there is an unusual round building, with other buildings around it, called the Pot House, and then on to Worsbrough Mill. There is an old mill there which was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, when William the Conqueror had an inventory made of everything in his new kingdom. An enormous 60 acre reservoir was built in 1804. The area is now a nature reserve and there were excellent information boards about the many birds, animals and plants in the area. So many fungi were described, with ways to identify them and recipes for cooking them when you do. We didn’t take a long walk but enjoyed the views and noted the willows and reeds which have been provided with an environment by the natural action of silting and the consequent reduction of the open water in the reservoir.
A man asked me if I was a local, so I passed him on to Maureen who gave him instructions to wherever he wanted to go. It seems to be a natural part of the speech patterns here to extend conversation and to make a simple request and answer into a friendly chat.
After tea Steff and Jimmy came over to organise our trip to Stamford with them, and unfortunately Rohan was feeling unwell so he had to bow out of the trip. We set the alarm for a flying start.
Luckily the floors for the public were not affected by the floods but the downstairs kitchens and other rooms were completely inundated. The ceilings and doorways are low, with enormous wood beams looking like they have at least another thousand years of strength in them to hold up the mill. Upstairs there was more seating under the rafters and some old mill scales and an ancient churn, reminding patrons of the pub’s earlier incarnation. We had a cup of coffee and chatted to the new manager, who was very friendly and relaxed, despite the hectic time they had been through in preparing the pub for re-opening and operation.
We are becoming very familiar with the footpath beyond the mill, so we strode out quickly towards Hoyle Mill, where we left the path and walked up through what was once a village and is now an inner suburb of Barnsley. We walked around the primary school grounds and looked at the buildings and the playground. Part of the grounds was for staff car parking and it and most of the small areas for playing were asphalt. It was then that I noticed that there was a large sign saying that the grounds were under video surveillance, so I hoped that I wouldn’t hear sirens approaching as we retraced our steps up the long driveway. People tell us that Britain has more video surveillance cameras in public places than anywhere else in the world.This end of Barnsley has a much more hemmed-in feel, with many small, tall houses lining the road and tunnelling the walker along to the intersections. We spent a couple of hours in the Barnsley cemetery, which was established in the 1850s, but tricked us into thinking it was older because of the beautiful arcading and the entry that suggested an old priory. Here again we found so many families had lost so many children. Mine disasters had taken some people but the number of young men and women who died in their teens and twenties was still a puzzle to me. Later Graeme explained about the diseases connected to poverty, the terrible, crowded living conditions that people lived in, the lack of knowledge about basic hygiene and the lack of facilities to achieve it and the diseases that were once deadly, such as measles, which immunisations have virtually eliminated. TB, then known as consumption, was a major killer, and many people suffered from malnutrition to some degree, weakening their systems when other factors came into play. Add to that the diseases caused by working in mines and it was beginning to seem as if praise should be given for survival at all. We are not talking about the dark ages, but a time when our great grandparents lived, and since then sewage systems, sanitary systems, working conditions, advances in health knowledge and medicine and the welfare system have increased the age of life expectancy by twenty or thirty years. Infant mortality is a small fraction of what it used to be, with premature babies being saved, caesareans being performed and mothers not dying so often in childbirth.Maureen met us and took us for a tour in her car to Cawthorne, the village we had missed out seeing on Wednesday. It is a charming village off the main road, the sort of place that the ‘Midsomer Murders’ TV program could have been set in. A lane leads up to a bit of a square at the gate to the old All Saints Church, where the oldest part of the building has been added to over the centuries. It seemed a sacrilege to us to have used the most ancient of their tombstones for paving for the path around the church, with busy traffic areas being impossible to read. We were to learn over our travels that anything useful for building was not considered sacred to an era or purpose once its original setting was destroyed or had fallen into disrepair, so at least these old fallen tombstones had remained in the church yard, rather than becoming part of a barn wall elsewhere.
A large, austere tomb resembling a bomb shelter, seemingly without a door or entry but probably with one in the top, took over a whole corner of the church yard and was the final resting place for the Spencer-Stanhope family from Cannon Hall. Next door a field held more recent graves running down the hill amongst the wildflowers. As we left an old lady and a little boy of about four stopped by a very old grave that had an open circle of stone at the top of the gravestone. Obviously locals out for a walk, the grandmother reminded the little boy that this was the grave where the baby was buried. He said he remembered because there was its toy, meaning the stone that looked like it had a baby’s rattle on the top.A lady had been working in her perfect garden, keeping a Miss Marple like eye on the goings on in the church yard and the strangers in the village. She greeted us cheerily as we walked by, examining and adjusting the blooms on the rose bush that had acted as an inadequate screen for her.
The village is just about perfect, so naturally I looked around for a place to live in, settling on a very old house attached to the post office. The museum was closed but that was definitely something that we would have enjoyed visiting. We wandered around, past Holly Cottage, behind some gardens to try and view Cannon Hall, and around the Cawthorne Methodist Church, which has a façade like a two dimensional film set and a plain and functional building behind.
No-one was out and about apart, from some boys playing, so I did not meet any of the Wives of Cawthorne who had so thoughtfully placed their town name at the entrance.The rest of the trip was spent in driving through the countryside to look at the neighbouring village of Silkstone, where there is an unusual round building, with other buildings around it, called the Pot House, and then on to Worsbrough Mill. There is an old mill there which was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, when William the Conqueror had an inventory made of everything in his new kingdom. An enormous 60 acre reservoir was built in 1804. The area is now a nature reserve and there were excellent information boards about the many birds, animals and plants in the area. So many fungi were described, with ways to identify them and recipes for cooking them when you do. We didn’t take a long walk but enjoyed the views and noted the willows and reeds which have been provided with an environment by the natural action of silting and the consequent reduction of the open water in the reservoir.A man asked me if I was a local, so I passed him on to Maureen who gave him instructions to wherever he wanted to go. It seems to be a natural part of the speech patterns here to extend conversation and to make a simple request and answer into a friendly chat.After tea Steff and Jimmy came over to organise our trip to Stamford with them, and unfortunately Rohan was feeling unwell so he had to bow out of the trip. We set the alarm for a flying start.
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