00:00Ginnels are great. They're such interesting records of the past. The Great Ginnel Walk,
00:08which I lead, it travels two miles through the townscape of Headingley, but it also travels
00:17a thousand miles back into the past. So the Ginnels form a shortcut between places, but
00:24also between moments in time. Strictly speaking, the Great Ginnel is not one single Ginnel,
00:31it's a sequence of Ginnels. They start at High Park Corner and they go all the way through
00:38Headingley up to Wheatwood Hall, just about on the Ring Road, which is a walk of about
00:45two miles. And unlike walking around the streets, these Ginnels go in a straight line, so they
00:53really are a shortcut. As I say, it's a sequence of Ginnels rather than a single Ginnel, but
01:00what holds them all together is the fact that the Ginnels follow a footpath, which is a very
01:06ancient footpath. It goes back probably nearly a thousand years. Much of it is paved on tarmac
01:17or has cobblestones, but there are places where you can actually walk on the bare earth, where
01:23people have been walking for hundreds of years, and which gives you quite an uneasy, eerie feeling
01:29as you pass over it. So it's this sort of thing which makes the Ginnels so interesting.
01:34Well, in 1848, this on either side of me was simply open fields with a pathway running across them.
01:50But the fields are bought and Ridgeway House on my left was built. But the owner of the house now
01:57faced the prospect of a garden with a public footpath running right through it. And having spent all that
02:04money on his house, I don't think he was probably very keen on having the hoi polloi traipsing through
02:08his garden. So his idea was dig a trench through the garden, conceal it behind a couple of walls on
02:16either side, and you can't see it from here, but the ground level is actually at the height of those
02:21walls. So we now had the footpath running through the garden, and the passers-by will be invisible to
02:31the the occupants of the house. And so that he could still use the whole of his garden, at the far end of
02:36this Ginnel, he put a little footbridge over the top of the Ginnel. And so he now had the access to both
02:43both parts of his garden, and the passers-by would be invisible going through this Ginnel.
02:48And the Ginnel is distinctive enough for it actually to be now a listed building.
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