Exploring The Great Ginnel in Headingley

Yorkshire Evening Post

Explore the ways in which rural footpaths have become fossilised as urban ginnels, as green fields were developed into a built environment. The Great Ginnel is united by two footpaths, which are both long and ancient, two miles and medieval. From Hyde Park (Wrangthorn, as was) we shall make our way through a series of ginnels to the site of the medieval Wood Mill.

Transcript

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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