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Marsden,
A True Yorkshire Village
 Perched on the very edge of Yorkshire is the village of Marsden, known for its wandering moorland sheep, its famous high canal tunnel and for its TV role as the fictional town of Royston Vasey.
Although Marsden is only a mile or two away from the Lancashire border, it is very much a true Yorkshire village with hardy folk, its own real ale brewery and a gritty bleak moorland backdrop rising up at the head of this once great textile valley where top quality cloth was made in abundance.
Despite the changes that Marsden and the rest of the Colne Valley have seen in the latter part of the 20th Century when textiles declined, the village has continued to grow and develop with new industry, more house building and a welcome boost in tourism thanks to TV and the canal redevelopment.
Marsden found TV fame when a BBC film crew chose the village as the fictional rural community of Royston Vasey, the home of The League of Gentlemen, a programme first shown in 1999.
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 Known for one particular catchphrase ‘a local shop for local people’, Marsden became home to strange sights during the film of the TV series, including an odd-looking house-like building on the hillside which was used as the ‘local shop’ for filming.
Over the years Marsden has also regularly been used for filming scenes from the popular Last Of The Summer Wine, Wokenwell and Where The Heart Is. Footage of the village’s main street, hillsides, church and river are regularly featured.
A few years on and Marsden is still on the tourist trail thanks to the renovation of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal which flows from the lower end of Colne Valley through the Standedge Tunnel to the Lancashire village of Diggle.
What makes Marsden so special is that it is home to the extraordinary Standedge Tunnel which is a three-and-a-quarter mile long amazing feat of engineering. Cut through the hillside, the tunnel is the highest (196 metres above sea level), longest (5,029 metres) and deepest canal (194 metres) in the country.
The project was started in 1794 at the height of ‘Canal Mania’ period and took 17 years to complete – with a little help from one of Britain’s greatest civil engineers, Thomas Telford.
Boat trips are available through the tunnel in a glass roofed boat, enabling visitors to wonder at this remarkable work of engineering and see the cramped conditions which workers on the canal must have endured. A boat was recently ‘legged’ through the tunnel for the first time in over 50 years.
A visitor centre sits alongside the entrance to the tunnel, providing visitors with information about the canal history. The whole length of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal has been restored in recent years with new bridges, walkways etc.
Also an integral part of the canal network is Marsden’s Mikron Theatre. During the summer months the theatre’s professional actors live and travel onboard their 70-year-old narrowboat Tyseley, performing at canal and riverside venues including pubs, village halls, museums and marinas.
 During the last 35 years Mikron has tackled such diverse subjects as the history of the waterways and the lives of the boat people, the Luddites, hilltop farming, the history of beer and brewing, the conflict between conservation and tourism, the protests over the Newbury bypass and the suffrages.
The company regularly runs theatre workshops and a programme of arts and cultural activities at Marsden Mechanics Hall. It prides itself on original live theatre with a strong musical element.
No words about Marsden would be complete however without the story of the Marsden Cuckoo – the origins of which are celebrated in the village each Spring.
Signs that a long harsh winter was turning into Spring were very important for people living in the bleak Pennines and they always welcomed the appearance of crocus, snowdrops and daffodils to prove that the cold weather was on its way out. According to tradition the sound of the first cuckoo was always heard in the Colne Valley at Marsden Spring Cattle Fair.
 The legend of the cuckoo has various sources: several people decided to capture a cuckoo in order to keep the Spring but after they frightened it, it flew away. Another version says the first cuckoo is heard at Scout, an area just south of Marsden – and again capture was tried by building a wall around the tree in which it had lodged.
A third version tells us a cuckoo was lodged in a chimney, and although an attempt was made to add bricks to the chimney to stop it flying away, of course, it soon made its escape. Similar stories about cuckoos are heard in other Yorkshire villages.
Marsden goes ‘cuckoo’ in order to celebrate the start of Spring with a festival including walks, ceilidhs, folk music nights and morris and maypole dancing.
In recent years the festival has been attended by people from all over the UK, keen to join in this celebration of an attempt to keep eternal Spring.
Marsden is also known for its textile heritage and one of the village’s most successful textile barons was John Crowther who established Bank Bottom Mills. Over the years Crowther and Sons opened many mills in Marsden and the Colne Valley.
 In 1936 Bank Bottom covered 14 acres, used 680 looms and 43 carding machines and employed 1,900 people. Today the village’s Hey Green Hotel, which is often chosen as a venue for celebrity weddings, still keeps the name alive with its Crowther’s Brasserie dining area.
Today the village of Marsden is a thriving residential area with plenty of local shops, a stunning moorland backdrop, plenty of community events and an active National Trust office to promote walks and events in the adjoining Marsden Moor.
It is home to a series of reservoirs that drop down the Wessenden Valley from neighbouring Meltham and provide ideal rural routes for keen dog walkers and ramblers. Marsden is home to various sporting activities – it has its own nine-hole golf club which must have some of the highest, bleakest and most challenging holes in the game, it has a neighbouring tennis club, cricket field and bowling green and lower down the valley, football fields used by all ages for local league games.
Over the years it has become known for its large numbers of sheep which graze the adjoining moorland but who, from time to time, prefer to munch the lush lawns and flowers of local householders gardens.
 Many attempts have been made to resolve this problem and indeed the village’s wandering sheep have hit the headlines on many occasions, particularly when some of them decided they could cross a moorland cattle grid to come down off the moors into the nearby village. Tales about the animals rolling `commando style’ over the bars, and helping each other across the grid made headlines in several national newspapers.
Indeed a car journey around the Standedge hillside above Marsden is never complete without having to dodge a few stray sheep crossing the road.
It’s surprising that many of them don’t meet their death on the fast road over to Lancashire.
The first coach road between Huddersfield to the East and Manchester to the West was made in 1760. It was constructed by Blind Jack of Knaresborough, who had been a musician and guide, as well as a projector and constructor of highways despite his blindness. The road was laid on heather bundles over the boggy terrain. Much of this road is still in use today
To avoid the steepest gradient on the old road, a new section was constructed in 1791 and is also still in use. At the height of coach traffic six coaches each way between Huddersfield and Manchester would change horses at the Old New Inn in Marsden, and passengers were asked to dismount in consideration for the horses during the long pull up out of the village.
So that concludes Around Town’s look at Marsden – a village with plenty going on, plenty to say for itself and a bright future with its continued popularity with homeowners, its canal heritage and TV fame.
From early times when men first lived on the hilltops, evidence of which dates back to 2,000 BC, to the building of Roman roads and the manufacture of cloth at specialist mills first built in the 1700s, Marsden has been a great settlement.
Although Black Fever hit Marsden in 1798 and killed 300 people, the village picked up itself and started to build roads and houses for its people. Today although the sound of textile mills has gone, Marsden has a different kind of prosperity created by the the canal, tourism and its stunning National Trust scenery, popular with walkers.
Published Spring 2007. All information correct at time of print
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