Sneinton and Me 9 - The Mounts

  The Mounts on Edale Road

I lived on Edale Road during the first 11 years of my life, where we kids were privileged to have a vast adventure playground right on our doorstep: The Mounts. This was an area of scrub, cliffs, rocks, open grassland and a disused railway cutting between Sneinton Dale and Carlton Road. It was an area which, to use a modern expression, was rewilding itself after brickworks, claypits and allotments had moved on and abandoned it.

This OS 1:1250 map from 1956 shows it much as I remember it. There is Sneinton Dale farmhouse at the bottom right (1) with Edale Road Girls' School on the other side of the recently abandoned Suburban Railway. There was an outcrop which we called 'The Rocks' (2) which seemed very high to us and which was very climbable. 

We left Edale Road in Spring 1956, just after my eleventh birthday. For most of my time there The Mounts had been unfenced but at some point - I can't remember precisely when - spiked railings appeared and access was denied. For a short while. We soon dug a hollow under the railings in the corner where the school meets the street and it was business as usual. Then bin lorries and bulldozers started to arrive from the Carlton Road side. It had become a landfill site. It must have been a big operation because eventually the level rose above all those irregular contours and it was capped and grassed over. I remember the noise and the mess, and the grownups complaining about rats. 

There's now a footpath going from Carlton Road, near its junction with Cardale Road, through the site to Edale Road at the point where we tunnelled under the railings all those years ago. In 2023 a friend and I used it to do a bit of exploring. We found the site to be a very pleasant natural space in the middle of the urban landscape. However there is a large area which is railed off - access denied. Maybe this is the main body of the landfill, unsuitable for building and possibly contaminated. Or just an ex-playing field awaiting a new owner - see below.

The Gun on The Rocks?

Our parents told us that there had been an anti-aircraft gun on top of The Rocks during the recently ended war. The gun was gone but there remained a concrete hard standing, some metalwork and what looked like some low concrete shelters nearby.

During our 2023 exploration we found what might be the remains of that gun emplacement. This picture, looking across the site towards Burrows Court, shows part of a concreted area with some embedded metalwork. 

Some of the concrete and metal

The Rocks no longer
stand above the surrounding land. Is this because the landfill and capping brought the surrounding land up to the same level? This would have to be the case for it to be the site of the gun. If the Rocks had been levelled then of course any evidence of the gun platform would have been obliterated.

Seventy Years Before

Here's what it looked like in 1885 on the OS 25 inch to the mile map. The brickworks on Carlton Road is well established but as yet is not pushing out into the farm fields which had been enclosed a hundred years before. The little cluster of streets at the end of Windmill Lane - Sneinton Elements - is established and there is an embankment up to field level behind them. The farmhouse is there at bottom right - it would remain until the 21st century.  

The arrow indicates a trig point (i.e. triangulation station). These were pillars erected at high points by the Ordnance Survey for surveying purposes. It can be seen better in this closeup.

The scene 16 years later is shown below. Work had started on the suburban railway line in the late 'eighties and by 1901 it was up and running, crossing the Dale over a bridge by the farmhouse and cutting through allotments on its way to Thorneywood station.

The clay extraction for the brickyard had pushed out behind the houses, connected by a tramway. (As kids we sometimes found randomly strewn lengths of rail around the site.) 

By 1920, the six inch OS map shows that the workings have extended so far as to obliterate the fields. Remaining land has been given over to allotments. Hatching shows that the area round the trig point has been left alone, standing proud above the reduced level of the workings. 

Edale Road has put in an appearance and Barnston Road is laid out ready for building. The houses shown here on Edale Road were built around 1914 and did not extend the full length of the street. Additional houses were added later and are recognisable by their different facing bricks. I remember that, unlike our 1914 houses, they had a bath - albeit in the kitchen. Barnston Road had to wait until the late 20s for most of its houses - built by the council in compliance with a short-lived policy of using infill sites.

This map, published by OS in 1947, needs handling with care. It's a 1938 revision, delayed from publication by the war I guess. Edale Road is shown with the 'new' houses missing. They weren't. I was there. Similarly, Barnston Road had been completed by then. And by 1947 the Skipton and Ipswich Circus houses were built. The trig point still stands above the excavated lowland of the brickworks. 

But as can be seen from this closeup of the map shown at the beginning of this post, it was gone by 1956.

So I'm going to suggest that the brickworks avoided the high point with the trig point when they extracted clay, and that was the feature we called The Rocks. The elevated situation that made it suitable for a trig point might also make it suitable for an anti-aircraft gun.

Whether or not the concrete we found is a remnant of that gun is moot. Its position looks about right considering the line of sight to Burrows Court on Windmill Lane in the photograph. It would need some proper archaeology to clarify the issue though. 

Mornings in the early 'fifties on Edale Road would see a bunch of kids (and often dogs) spill out from the houses and roam all over The Mounts. We played, climbed dangerous cliffs, got dirty, suffered minor injuries and scavenged useless bits of junk.

 This map, OS 1;1250 revised between 1962 and 1967, shows our area of unstructured, self directed, play replaced in part by a playing field for structured, directed play. I think we had the best out of it. The playing field belonged to Manvers Secondary Modern School, built on the site of the brickworks.

Left: 

1/ The Rocks

2/ Vertiginous climbing cliff

3/ Tin bath slide

4/ Scary Carlton Road Kids

5/ Where we tunnelled under the railings - now access to the footpath

6/ Trespassing and being chased by caretaker zone

7/ Putrefying remains of dead fox for our dog to roll in.

8/ Spooky old tunnel.

Notes and sources

The maps are sourced from the National Library of Scotland's wonderful interactive database of historic maps - essential for anyone wishing to research landscape. https://maps.nls.uk/

Information about Barnston Road, Skipton Circus and Ipswich circus  council houses is from Homes and Places, a History of Nottingham's Council Houses by Chris Matthews, a comprehensive and highly readable account of an epic era in Nottingham's history. 

Sneinton Dale Farm, aka Betts' Farm. 

This photo is taken from a 2001 article by local historian Stephen Best available on the Nottinghamshire History website.

The history of Nottingham's brickworks is told in Clay Stealers to St Pancras Station, which includes a chapter on the suburban railway, by Jeffrey A Sheard, printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 OBT.

Concrete 'shelters': the nearest thing to those low 'shelters' on The Rocks I've seen is this sort of thing which I saw in Lebanon in 2017, left over from the civil war of the 1980s. Not identical, but about right for size and general appearance if 70 odd years of memory can be trusted.

See also

https://whyshistory.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-past-is-right-behind-us.html