Burley in Wharfedale, West Riding of Yorkshire
Historical Description
Burley-in-Wharfedale, a village, a township, and an ecclesiastical parish in the civil parish of Otley, in the W.R. Yorkshire, on the Leeds and Ilkley railway, 2 miles NW from Otley, and 10 from Bradford. The township has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Leeds, and a station at the junction of the M.R. and N.E.R. Area, 3133 acres; population of township, 2661; of ecclesiastical parish, 2467. It is governed by a local board of nine members. Greenholme, Walton House, Escroft Hall, Moorville, Burley Hall, Barley House, Wharfeside Grange, and Wharfeside are chief residences. Burley House was built in the latter part of the last century by Maude, the descriptive poet. Many of the inhabitants are employed in the Greenholme Mills, connected with the Bradford trade, of which mills the Right Hon. W. R. Forster, M.P., was for many years the principal proprietor. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Ripon; gross value, £220 with residence. The church is a building in the Gothic style, erected in 1843 on the site of an earlier structure, and was restored and beautified in 1870 at a cost of upwards of £2000. There are Congregational, Wesleyan, and Primitive Methodist chapels. A Jubilee Drill Hall was built in 1888, and is used for public meetings and entertainments. The lecture hall and schools of Greenholme form a beautiful structure in the centre of the village, where a monument was erected by the villagers to the memory of the Right Hon. W. R. Forster, M.P., who died in 1886. His remains are interred in the God's Acre, opened in 1885, a short distance from the church he so regularly attended.
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for the West Riding of Yorkshire is available to browse.
Maps
Online maps of Burley in Wharfedale are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following West Riding newspapers online: