January 24th, 2009
A late headmaster from Aberford Primary School, a Mr W. Pickles undertook a collection of water colours depicting local scenes, the picture above is one from the collection, It’s the windmill adjacent to the old road (Windmill Hill) between Aberford and Lotherton that was diverted in the 1960’s to facilitate the A1 bypass, since realigned in the 1990’s to accommodate the A1-M1 Link. According to details from the local publication Aberford in Times Past
To give an idea of the location of the windmill see the animation below, which is taken from the tower on the Aberford Almshouses looking north east over the former Catholic Church.
Posted in Aberford | No Comments »
January 24th, 2009
I rather like the ease with which you can add content using Wordpress, however I was not happy with the standard interface design and although there are lots of templates which can be applied, I wanted the design to reflect that on my main Parlington Site. So I have now amended the template to my own design, which is close to the main site style.
Posted in General Info | No Comments »
November 6th, 2008
The picture shown here was discovered today [6th November], that is a device with an SD Memory card in it with the picture on the card. It was found poking out of the mud on Parlington Lane, at the rear of the Dark Arch, so if you know who these people are, I may be able to restore to them the device they lost, and yes despite lying in the mud it still works! Sadly my reason for wading through the mud to find Matilda [see earlier post] brought no results.
Tags: gadget, Lost
Posted in Aberford, Other Stuff, Parlington Lane | No Comments »
November 6th, 2008
Update 9th November Remembrance Sunday, Matilda returned at just after 11:00am following a two minute silence! Thank you.
Sadly our cat disappeared yesterday, she is called Matilda and is tortoiseshell colour, with white on her tummy. She is pictured here a couple of summers back in the garden. Normally she is in and out of the house throughout the day, but yesterday [5th November 2008] she was not seen after about 10.00am. She is a very loving and easygoing animal and is greatly missed by my wife and I. I pray she returns and has not met with some awful fate. It is very sad to loose a family pet, Matilda is not our first pet to have gone missing, but here at least we felt she was in ideal surroundings, virtually no traffic, plenty of space and always a warm spot near the fire in the winter, unlike the previous home. So if any readers are local and do spot her please get in touch,
Thanks
p.s. There were very few firework activitities around on bonfire night, most happening over the previous weekend, so I don’t think she was scared off, but you never know!
Tags: cat, missing
Posted in Aberford, Parlington Estate | No Comments »
June 2nd, 2008
You can often hear woodpeckers in the trees around Parlington, knocking seven bells out of a branch or bough, but you rarely see them. However, “Woody the frequent flyer to the peanut island on a pole” has become a garden favourite but less so to the more common birds queuing in the surrounding bushes awaiting their turn on the feeders.
Tags: , english wild life, Greater spotted woodpecker, wild birds
Posted in Gardens | No Comments »
May 20th, 2008
Recent excavations in the area of the Dining Room at the old Hall have uncovered some spent 303 calibre cartridge cases. Thus far two have been unearthed, one in much better condition than the other, the picture below is of the two cartridges.
The spent cartridges point to the occupation during World War Two of the Army at Parlington. But who were they shooting at, are the two cartridges found so far those which were NOT collected after the firing took place! Will we ever know! But if we travel back some decades, the area beyond the house to the south side was a deer park and amongst the features of this place were the occasional shooting parties. At one such event in 1870 on the 18th June a gardener’s labourer, named Edward Cotton, while acting as a marker at a private rifle range at Parlington Park, near Leeds, was accidently shot by Lieutenant Colonel Gascoigne. The marker had left the rifle butt whilst firing was proceeding and without receiving any signal. The ball passed through his body and killed him on the spot. [An extract from the Leeds Mercury or the Leeds Intelligencier]
Whilst walking in the vicinity some years ago, beyond the line of the shooting range I came across a lead bullet which had hit something extremely hard like a brick surface, as it was flattened like a pancake. This was perhaps of the same type of ammunition that killed the unfortunate Edward Cotton.
The cartridges were found in the excavation of the ground in the location highlighted by the blue rectangle.
Tags: 303 cartridges, bullets, Death in the deer park, WW2
Posted in Excavations, The Hall, WW2 Relics | No Comments »
May 12th, 2008
I decided to retire one of the servers, an old original series one Apple XServe, I say old it’s about 5 years. However the retirement plan worked out to be more messy than I had hoped. Everything including a multitude of sites were re-located on a new server at a different venue, all was well until I discovered that everything on the new system required case sensitivity, whereas on the Unix based Mac it did not, that is to say the database calls and referenced files, which had been uploaded by clients might have been mypicture.JPG whereas it should have been mypicture.jpg. No much difference but it has caused a real problem changing file and database references but not other syntax, across literally thousands of files.
Parlington.info suffered this problem with image files, or so I thought, but then I discovered it was not that which was the problem but that the file system permissions were different on the two servers, so this site has had a lack of images for some time now. My apologies to any readers.
Tags: Server Issues
Posted in Other Stuff | No Comments »
March 25th, 2008
The sudden arrival of three or four inches of snow prompted many people to get out their cameras this Easter, here are a few taken locally and a couple by a friend, who sent them by email.
Additional photos are available here: my dotmac account
The Triumphal Arch on the Parlington Estate
The former Almshouses
The gatehouse to the Almshouses.
Tags: easter, snow, Triumphal Arch
Posted in Almshouses, Parlington Estate, Triumphal Arch | No Comments »
March 8th, 2008
Having set up the Yorkshire Speakers Directory a few months ago I wanted to add more to the site so I decided to put a bookshop in place for local books and things of local interest.
Posted in General Info, Introduction | No Comments »
February 29th, 2008
For those who walk the picturesque route along Parlington Lane, you may have noticed that the lake which lies just beyond the Gamekeeper’s cottage, to the south east, has been emptied, to allow work to remove the build-up of sediment.
To ensure I had a record of the event I slipped along to take a few photos, which are available here. Whilst there I took some time to look at a pipe inlet which runs towards the Gamekeeper’s cottage, this was until work started, covered by a steel filter, which is shown in the collection of images associated with this post. I believe it was used for gas purification in the small gas works which stood adjacent to the cottage, the gas production was for Parlington Hall and probably ceased before or around the time the Hall was abandoned following the death of Col. F.C. Trench-Gascoigne in 1905.
Whilst looking round the lake, quite near to the pipe inlet I noted earlier, I was surprised to find a piece of marble protruding from the black mud. closer inspection revealed it to be a piece of blue/grey marble skirting the same as pieces found in the excavations of Parlington Hall, so it must have been thrown there years ago when the demolition was in progress. The value of masonry and the like was cast away with the demolition must have been substantial.
Tags: Dredging, Excavations, Lake
Posted in Parlington Estate, Parlington Lane | No Comments »