Milner Field, the lost house

If you walk right to the top of the carriage drive through the Milner Field estate, you arrive at the North Lodge, which was renovated in 2008 but still demonstrates the heavy gothic style that characterised the original mansion. As I said yesterday, Milner Field house itself was demolished in the 1950s and little now remains. You can barely discern even where its entrance archway branched off the main drive. I wandered through the woods, loosely following the boundary fence to the south.

Eventually I stumbled across a few huge, shaped stones, evidently part of the original house. It seems that over the years much of the stone was plundered for other buildings and some of the interior panelling and roof tiles ended up in Salts Mill itself, so there is not much left to see.

The brickwork appears to be an entrance to the vaulted cellars that ran under the house.

If you look carefully, you can still find the floor outline of the massive conservatory, with kerbstones that bordered the beds and some of its mosaic flooring, though that's believed to date from the 1900s when the conservatory was renovated.

It's interesting to root around the site. I also have a fascinating book: 'Milner Field, The Lost Country House of Titus Salt Jnr' by Richard Lee-Van den Daele and R David Beale, that explores its history.  Click HERE to see photos and info about the original house.

To the woods

I'm fortunate to live very close to some beautiful ancient woodland. I walk through Hirst Woods most weeks, enjoying the peace that one finds among huge old trees. There are more woods along Shipley Glen that I sometimes explore but I rarely come to the area in these photos. This is the site of Milner Field, the huge Victorian mansion that Titus Salt Jnr had built in 1870, to the north-west of Saltaire. The broad path you can see in the photos is, in fact, the carriage drive, an extension of the Coach Road (see yesterday) that runs past the back of Salts Mill and alongside Roberts Park, across the river from Saltaire. It formed the driveway through the mansion's grounds, guarded by a lodge at either end.

Titus Salt Jnr died suddenly here, aged just 44, in 1887. The house was then occupied by a succession of other families, all of whom suffered family tragedies and early deaths, such that the house gathered a gruesome reputation and was eventually unsaleable. It stood empty from the 1930s and was demolished in the 1950s. Now, the site of the house is barely discernible, becoming overgrown with trees. The grounds are reputed to be haunted! Certainly, it can feel very isolated and eerie up there, which is why I rarely venture through the gates. However, on a beautiful spring day, I decided there was little to be feared and I quite enjoyed my walk, delighting in the fresh new leaves and the early bluebells.

Zoom

There are few advantages to having temporarily to revert to a camera I last used seven years ago, though it did and still does take mostly quite reasonable photos, now I've remembered how to operate it. One of its plus points, however, is the very long zoom range it has, effectively from 28-504mm - though it is a 'digital zoom' rather than an optical zoom. (That means the camera enlarges the photo and trims the edges electronically, which results in a loss of quality over the same image taken with an optical zoom lens.)

It does mean I could 'zoom' across the fields from the riverbank and take a closer view of one of the the lodges that guarded the gates to Milner Field, the now demolished grand mansion that was built for Titus Salt Jnr. The lodge is still used as a residence, though it's rather isolated at the end of the Coach Road, set amongst woods and fields. It shares the same sort of solid, heavy architecture that characterised the Victorian Gothic mansion.

Salt family heritage

It was a huge privilege to meet Nick Salt, Sir Titus Salt's great great grandson and a great grandson of Titus Salt Jnr and his wife Caroline. He retains a close connection with Saltaire and brought along some hand tools that had belonged to his great grandfather.

As well as being closely involved with the running of Salts Mill and the village of Saltaire, Titus Salt Jnr was an innovator and was interested in practical skills. He himself was a skilled woodworker and turner, and had a workshop or 'Turning Room' attached to the billiard room in the Milner Field mansion (where he suffered his fatal heart attack at the age of just 44). Some of the tools were actually inscribed with 'T SALT JUNr' - rather moving to see and hold.

There were also examples of some of the wood and ivory objects he turned, including the ivory mason's mallet used by his young son, Gordon (Nick's grandfather), who was not quite three at the time, to lay the foundation stone of Milner Field in 1869.

Nick's lineage is, I believe:

Sir Titus Salt (1803-1876) - had 11 children,  Titus Junior being his fifth son.
Titus Salt Junior (1843-1887) - had 4 children, Gordon Locksley Salt being his oldest son.
Gordon Locksley Salt (1866-1938) - had 3 children, John Salt being his middle child and only son.
John Scarlett Alexander Salt (1905-1947) - had 3 children, Nicholas being his middle child and second son.
Nicholas (Nick) John Salt (b 1945)

Milner Field Farm

Many of the original buildings associated with Milner Field's model farm still survive in use. Just behind the farmhouse is the small, square dairy (now used as a store), where milk, butter and cream would have been prepared for the folk up in the grand mansion. The outbuildings are built in a U-shape of cowsheds, barns and stables, now infilled with a more modern structure that shelters the huge milk storage tanks. 

I sampled some of their farm-made ice cream - and very delicious it was, too. 

You could see into the former milking shed, though now the cows are milked in a more modern facility in one of the other buildings. I understand that the farm is solely a dairy farm nowadays. Any crops grown are used as animal feed and the few chickens running loose were there to provide eggs for the famer's family.

Dairy cows mean calves and there were a few youngsters in the barn.

In the field by the gatehouse we saw a very newborn calf, struggling to stand. There were two cows beside it. The one with the white shoulders was its mother but the other seemed to be rather aggressively trying to keep the calf from feeding. I have no idea about cows so I'm not sure if that was normal behaviour or not!

A visit to the farm

I've driven past many times, but never really speculated what lay beyond these gates, the entrance to Milner Field Farm. To coincide with Saltaire Festival and as part of the Heritage Open Days scheme (which sees private properties of historic interest opened to the general public), Saltaire History Club was offering guided tours of the farm.

It was built by Titus Salt Junior (one of Sir Titus' sons) in 1871 as a model farm for his grand mansion at Milner Field. I've written about the now demolished house in the past. (See HERE) It has a fascinating story though little remains apart from a few old stones, a fragment of the conservatory's mosaic floor and the top and bottom gate lodges. The farm, in contrast, continues as a business, run as a dairy farm by tenant farmers, currently the fourth generation of the Downs family, who have lived there since 1902.

The gates and gatehouse to the farm (top photo) give a hint of the grandness of the original Milner Field mansion, which was a solid-looking place built in a heavy Victorian Gothic style. The farmhouse itself (above) is less grand, though its windows with their slightly rounded arches give a nod to Saltaire's architecture. 

It has a wonderful view, perched on the hillside looking down towards Cottingley. The lone tree in the photo below is the upper of my two 'favourite trees', the ones I often take photos of when I'm walking along the canal towpath at Dowley Gap. (See HERE). 

To the east of the farm and its outbuildings, there's a view down to Saltaire itself.

Behind and slightly above the farm is the site where the Milner Field mansion was. The site is now overgrown by trees but just underneath those trees is a wall and a ha-ha (hidden ditch) that marked the garden boundary.

For those who like maps, I've included one below. Saltaire village and its mill are in the bottom right

corner and I've marked Milner Field Farm and the site of the original Milner Field mansion with a purple overlay.  

Milnerfield trees - and controversy

Two trees in the winter sunshine. I've photographed these two in all seasons (click the 'two trees' label below) and I like how winter reveals their structure and shape so well.

The trees are in fields above the Leeds-Liverpool Canal near Dowley Gap, just past the aquaduct. Behind and to the left, the newly bare branches reveal a few buildings, which belong to Milnerfield Farm. The farm dates back to the 1860s, originally built by the Salt family on their Milnerfield estate. It has been run continuously as a tenanted dairy farm since then. The landlords have recently submitted a contentious planning application to demolish many of the existing farm buildings and build a business park for innovative technology start-up companies, backed by Bradford University and the College. According to press reports, the farmer was not even notified of this prior to the application's submission, which seems very mean. There is, inevitably, a lot of local opposition to the plans, preferring to retain the existing farm, which is in the green belt, and fearful that any change would open the way to housing developments in the area. I am not sure when the final decision will be made.

Sir James Roberts, family man

Photograph © the Roberts family, used with the kind permission of Julia Bolton Holloway

Saltaire has a thriving History Club (see the village website) and several members are actively engaged in ongoing research.  I was fortunate to be able to attend the last meeting and obtained a hard copy of the latest in a line of 'Saltaire Journals' (which are also downloadable free from the website).  Researched and written by David King, it is entitled 'The Second Lord of Saltaire: the family history of Sir James Roberts Bart. JP, LLD.'  It makes fascinating reading, though I can only briefly summarise it here.  We should be most grateful to David for his painstaking research that brings to life a man whose influence on Saltaire was fundamental and important, but who has hitherto tended to be overlooked.

The site of Milner Field

This gatehouse - South Lodge - and its counterpart, the North Lodge are virtually all that remains of Titus Salt Jnr's home of Milner Field. Sir Titus Salt bought the land, about a mile outside Saltaire, in 1869 for £21000. There was a manor house already there, but this was demolished and in 1873 Titus Jnr built the house known as Milner Field - an imposing neo-Gothic building, full of the most modern of Victorian conveniences.

The house was eventually sold when the fortunes of the Salt empire began to crumble in the 1890s, some time after Titus Jnr's premature death in 1887. Strangely, all the subsequent owners suffered unusual misfortunes - lavishly described by Bill Bryson in Chapter 17 of his wonderfully funny book, "Notes from Small Island": "Before long the house developed a reputation as a place where you could reliably expect to come a cropper. People moved in and abruptly moved out again, with ashen faces and terrible wounds."

The house eventually lay empty for twenty years and was demolished in the 1950s. Now, all that remains are a few overgrown ruins, including (I am told) the remains of the mosaic conservatory floor. As Bill Bryson concludes: "What would old Titus Senior think if you brought him back and showed him that the family fortune was spent and his busy factory was now full of stylish chrome housewares and wooftah paintings of naked male swimmers with glistening buttocks?".
What indeed....