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Part of Thomas Jefferys map - The County of York Survey'd - 1775 [click picture for enlargement] The lordship of the manor of Shipley remained in local hands until 1745, when the widow of the last Rawson lord of the manor, Judith Rawson, married the Rev. Cyril Jackson of Stamford in Lincolnshire, who became the new manorial lord. He was succeeded by his son, also called Cyril, who was the Dean of Christchurch College, Oxford. While, for most of its history, Shipley has been an agricultural community, the onset of the industrial revolution had an immediate effect on the town. The first major change came in the 1770s with the creation of the Leeds and Liverpool canal. This work required the construction of two long viaducts, one at Dockfield and the other, now known as The Seven Arches, at Hirstwood. The opening of the canal allowed much greater freedom of movement for produce and goods into and out of the district, and Shipley took full advantage of this. Airedale, the valley in which Shipley stands, marks the northern edge of the Yorkshire coalfields. The coal lying under Shipley forms part of the Lower Coal Measure deposits, and though of poor quality, it was readily available. The coal was exposed in the narrow, Ice Age, run-off channels, now known as Northcliffe Wood and Spring Wood, and was mined by the digging of adits - i.e. short tunnels driven straight into the hillside. The seams continued under the hills covering the Moorhead and Nab Wood areas, and numerous shafts are known to have been sunk across these hilltops in order to exploit this resource. Long lanes ran from several of these pit-heads to enable the coal to be taken down to the canal staithes, or loading platforms, at the bottom of the valley. The coal in Shipley continued to be exploited until the coming of the railways in the nineteenth century, when cheaper and better quality coal became available from the deep mines of south Yorkshire and Wales. Another early 'industrial' occupation in Shipley was that of stone quarrying. The stone, which outcrops mainly on the north-facing edge of Shipley Low Moor, is a hardwearing fine sandstone from the 'Rough Rock' deposits, laid down, like the coal measures, during the Carboniferous era some 300 million years ago. While there is little documentary evidence on the extent of stone quarrying in past centuries, the existence of large numbers of small, worked-out stone quarries that survived along Saltaire Road and Bingley Road, prior to the redevelopments in the area during the 1960s and 1970s, suggests that the industry was operating in Shipley for a very long time.
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