Hemingbrough Hagg Lane Green

Conservation, Heritage & Educational Project

Heritage of Hagg Lane Green

The word Hag is derived from the old Norse word Hogg, and can mean a firmer or solid area in a bog or on a moor, or alternatively the word can mean a cutting or a way through, while the word Hagge is an old Germanic word meaning a witch.  Hagg Lane was once part of the Royal forest of Galtres, which extended as far south as the flood or warp land of Hemingbrough and Babthorpe.  On the 14th July 1234 the Kings Charter sanctioned the removal of wood by those families who had been granted land in the area, and this was the start of the clearance of the forest of Galtres.

 

The removal of wood enabled tracks to be cut between the communities resulting in words like “Hursts”, “Haggs”, “Riddings” and “Thwaites”, etc and so here we have Hagg Lane.  Of course these were earthen tracks, which in winter became so boggy as to become impassable, so the remedy was to cut more wood and make the tracks wider resulting in some of today’s lanes still having very wide grass verges.  Hagg Lane being the road from Howden to the Selby/Market Weighton Turnpike road, by way of South Duffield, which resulted in the track being very wide in the area of today’s ponds.

The reason the ponds were dug in Hagg Lane verges is simple, by the 1700’s the few dwellings of dubious construction in the village “probably wattle and daub” were coming to the end of their life and a few residents could now afford to build houses of brick, there being no stone nearby but plenty of clay.  So Hagg Lane verges clay pits were dug, drying kilns constructed, the cured bricks being easily transported away by way of the lane.  Thin bricks were formed by hand in a shallow wooden mould before being cured in the small kilns.  The reason bricks were make thin was probably because the heat in the kilns was so unreliable.  Heminbrough was not unique, this development happened in many local villages where clay was available but today only a few of the original brick ponds still survive, while the houses built with the thin bricks are still identifiable.  Today the ponds are still there; the drying kilns area is overgrown with scrub, while a few inches beneath the surface evidence of this past industry still remains.  By facing north, the ponds and kiln area lie to the east of the lane, while to the west of the lane there remains a single pond, unrelated with the brick works.  This pond was dug specifically in this area for one reason alone; it was fed with a constant supply of fresh water from the adjacent ditch.  This was the local retting pond, in which to “rett” in other words soak Flax fibres after the Linseeds had been threashed out.  Retting required a constant supply of fresh running water to flush away the leached out residue from the process.  The object being to break down the cellulose before the dried fibres could be turned to Linen.  Today while the ditch still supports water cress, the pond is sadly overgrown and silted badly,  and its sluice system has been destroyed some time ago.

How the brick kilns might have looked..

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The work of the Hagg Lane Green Conservation Group has been kindly sponsored by the following organisations;