Millstone grit

by Glyn Hughes

Millstone Grit takes the form of a fifty mile walk through the West Riding and East Lancashire, exploring the industrial towns and moors. Glyn Hughes had grown up in the Cheshire countryside but on moving to the Pennines was deeply shocked by the impact of industry on the natural world; but over time he found beauty in its special landscapes and came to love the people who lived in them. In Millstone Grit the author investigates the specific culture of place – with chapters on Methodism and the Luddites, interviewing a millworker, examining the awakening of an urban working-class consciousness. Hughes is always observant, careful, poetic and no-nonsense, this new edition will find readers keen to rediscover his vision of the north.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, History

158 pages, Unknown Binding

First published March 20, 1975

About the author

Glyn Hughes has won national prizes and awards for his poetry collections. His first book, Neighbours, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Welsh Arts Council Poet’s Prize.

He was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize as well as the David Higham Prize for his first novel, Where I Used To Play On The Green. He was short-listed for The Whitbread Novel of the Year for The Antique Collector, also for the James Tait Black Prize, and the Portico Prize.

Reviews

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Description: Written as an account of a journey on foot, Millstone Grit is a captivating and impassioned evocation of the Pennine landscape, its towns, villages and wild places. Combining the poetic and the humorous, Glyn Hughes threads together personal experience, local lore, history, myth, and legendary names from a bygone age, to bring vividly to life the beauty of this remarkable region and the unique qualities of its people, past and present. 'The work of a subtle poet with the ear of a stand-up comic and the eye of the most delicate of watercolourists. It is a work of sadness and savagery... of gentle compassion... a grand book. Grand' THE TIMES

'It is not a guide, but captures the essence of the place so
well that many readers are sure to want to travel that way
themselves' YORKSHIRE POST

'Enjoyable both verbally and visually... You can hear the
brass bands, you can smell the gas and coke and you can
hear the winds moaning over the moors by just looking at
the magnificently gloomy and absolutely appropriate
photographs' DERBYSHIRE LIFE AND COUNTRYSIDE

3* Millstone Grit
4* Glorius John
4* Where I Used To Play On The Green

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Millstone Grit is a coarse sandstone that can be found in Wales and across the North between Yorkshire and Lancashire. This block of rock is better known as the Peak District and the Pennines. The stone has been used for many things, including drystone walls, roofing and of course millstones.

The landscape that makes up this part of the country has come to define the people that live there. The region is surrounded by towns that once contained the textile industries that were an industrial force in their time.

When Glyn Hughes wrote this book in the 1970s, the region was beginning to change, globalisation was on the rise and big corporations were seeking the lowest labour costs that they could exploit and the mills were being closed. The life that the people knew would change forever and he captures that uncertainty about the future that they all have.

I thought this was a fascinating book about a part of the country that I know very little about. It is a glimpse of an era (still in my lifetime too) of a way of life that is now lost forever. He is a really good writer too. Like the rock that the region sits on, this prose glitters in all sorts of ways. I have found this with other poets, theirtheir skill in that type of writing makes non-fiction so good to read. I can strongly recommend this if you want to learn about this area of the north.

[Stephen Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sought this out second-hand because it concerns the patch of Yorkshire that has been my home for the past four years - a place which I love with a covert’s zeal - and is written by the poet Glyn Hughes, whose picture hangs on the wall of Sowerby Bridge train station, a few stops down on my commute. Written in the mid-1980s it describes a place much different to how it is now: the author writes of how he can sometimes still hear the nighttime clanging of the mills and factories which were already in terminal decline back then but have now vanished completely. The landscape, though, remains entirely recognisable in its bleak beauty:

“Millstone grit breaks out in the fields and slopes, as the bones press through the flesh of a hungry cow. In many places (...) it rises, swells and towers. Animal and human heads. Huge pregnant stomachs of stone, balanced on slender stems. All manner of reptile, beast, bird and sinewed human forms struggle mightily out of the rushes and the peat, bursting over the crowded industrial valleys below.”

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glyn Hughes, like his namesake Ted, found inspiration for striking poetry and prose in the upper Calder Valley of West Yorkshire. Much of the unique character of that particular stretch of the Pennines is shaped by the hard, dark millstone grit on which a hard living was eked out before the textiles boom of the early industrial revolution when the fast flowing rivers and damp climate supported the rapid growth of woollen (on the Yorkshire side) and cotton (on the Lancashire side) mills and transformed the way of life in a couple of generations. Hughes explored the valley on foot in the early Seventies and this book is the result. It’s a world on the cusp of another change as the mills start to close, and a de-industrialised future is on the horizon. He writes beautifully and with enormous understanding and sympathy for the people he meets. As a snapshot of a time and a place it’s a fascinating read. I see that it’s about to be reissued by the estimable Little Toller which will allow many new readers to discover this excellent book.

[Runningrara · Rating 3 out of 5]

5/2020. Published in 1975, I came across this after it was referenced by @benmyers76 in Under the Rock, and there are definite echoes. A journey, often poetic, always dark, over my running grounds, the Pennine moors around the Calder Valley. When I found myself appreciating the patina of the millstone grit in the walls, buildings and landscape, I knew this book had affected my soul, just a little.

[Paul Helliwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘my friends, we are all in a damnable state, and I scarcely know how we will get out of it’

this is the thought that occurred to the reverend grimshaw (one of the fathers of methodism) in the middle of one of his sermons. once the thought had occurred it had, in all honesty and simplicity, to be uttered.

millstone grit by glyn hughes is a walk of the pennine way and a memoir of his time living there.

hughes is a disciple of richard jefferies, of english transcendentalist nature writing, but a reader of fromm and e.p.thompson also - he teaches (intermittently) in the schools and colleges, cultivates his garden (when he has one), visits friends, walks and watches the weather, the rest of the time he paints and writes poetry. there are digressions on the mills and the luddites, on methodism, and a chapter like ranciere’s the nights of labour - on the study and culture of the newly literate working classes.

the locals sing the john o’grinfelt’s ballad 'four loom wever' that we would know in its june tabor or stick in the wheel's version - the old ones sing it secretively as a ballad their parents sang in victorian times, the youngsters sing it loudly in the folk clubs as something ‘relevant’ they learnt off a bert lloyd record.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely book about the less glamorous parts of Yorkshire but also a wonderful evocation of people and places from the past that have been lost to "progress".

The writer takes a walking tour through towns and countryside that he is familiar with and shares his feelings and observations.

Terrific book.

[Paul Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting very personal view of the Yorkshire Moorland covering history, life and culture.

Written as a life story and a journey on foot re-tracing his steps.

[Mick Canning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Millstone Grit by Glyn Hughes. This very readable book was originally published in 1975, describing a fifty mile walk the author took through East Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire; an exploration of the moorlands and villages alongside the industrial towns, all of them suffering in their own ways from the effects of the loss of traditional industries in that area. It is about Hughes’ attachment to this area he came to live in, the clash between human and non-human landscapes, and about working class history in these places, but above all else about some most remarkable people he meets along the way.