Robin Longbottom examines how few signs now remain of a once-thriving industry

JUST below the petrol garage at Station Road in Cross Hills is a narrow stile to a footpath that leads up to Park Lane.

Halfway along its length and to the right it passes what many locals once referred to as Ma Moon’s Pond.

Ma Moon, more correctly Mary Hodgson Moon, had moved to Cross Hills in the late 1930s and lived at Bank Road until her death in 1970.

She had farmed the land surrounding the pond and kept poultry and cattle. However, the pond had once been a sand pit and its origins lay in the demand for sand after the First World War.

The area was known as Sandylands and the name survives in a nearby row of terrace houses.

The pockets of sand were alluvial deposits laid down on the flood plain at the end of the last ice age and small quantities had probably been extracted over the centuries. It was an important local resource and had been put to many uses.

In the days before manufactured detergents, housewives and servants used it as a cleaning agent. The process, known as ‘sinding’, involved dipping a damp cloth into sand and using it to scour pots and pans before they were swilled out and put away. Period cookbooks often advised that cooking vessels should be clean of sand before they were used. Knives were often plunged in and out of a box, or tub, of sand to clean and polish the blade before stainless steel came into use. Sand was also spread onto flagged floors, particularly in the kitchen around the fireplace, or range, where it readily absorbed grease and spills from cooking pots.

Sand was also a sharpening agent. Mowers who went into the fields to cut hay and standing crops were required to have with them their scythe, a strickle, a grease horn, a bag of sand and a spiked hammer to “pitte the strickle with and make it keepe sand”. The Dialect of Craven, a glossary published by William Carr in 1828, describes a strickle as “a piece of wood besmeared with grease and strewed with sand” which was used to sharpen a scythe.

We now largely associate sand with mortar for the construction industry. In the early 19th century waterproof mortar for building was made up of one part slaked lime, one part ash and one part sand. When Portland cement came into general use towards the latter half of the century, the mix was usually three of sand to one of cement and for concrete two of sand and gravel to one of cement. Sand was therefore a much sought-after commodity as towns and villages expanded.

In addition to alluvial deposits, glacial sand was also found on the moor tops. Sand Pit Hill on Oakworth Moor lies just to the north of Hare Hill Edge on the Colne Road and the first Ordnance Survey sheet, published in 1852, records four sand pits in this area.

A photograph of a sand pit, at an unknown moorland location, held at Keighley Local Studies Library shows the workings and the temporary buildings associated with it. Workmen stand with hand tools to dig out the sand and gravel and remove it in wheelbarrows. Wooden buildings stand above the pit and the chimney of a stationary steam engine can be seen together with a sloping building to the right of it. The sloping building housed the shaker, or screener, that graded the material into fine and coarse sand and gravel.

Today the only evidence of this local industry survives in place names, such as Sandbeds at Riddlesden, Sandywood Street in Keighley, Sandylands in Cross Hills and Skipton and the sand pits that are recorded on early maps.