The Course of the River Calder

The River Calder flows like a thick blue vein through the heart of the Calder valley and on through the districts of Dewsbury and Wakefield. The Calder is feed by hundreds of becks, brooks, streams and five main rivers - the Cragg, Colne, Holme, Ryburn and Spen - each with their own distinctive biography. But the Calder is the mother river.

4,000 years ago, in what we call the Bronze Age, people moved into and through the Calder valley leaving their burial chambers, stone circles and cairns up on Hades Hill, Stones and Midgley Moor. Over a 1,000 years later the Roman army left its mark on the landscape in the form of the military road up on Blackstone Edge, the Roman Fort at Outlane and the Roman settlement in Castleford but it was the medieval merchants who began the widespread transformation of the moors and valleys with a network of packhorse routes from Hebden Bridge to Halifax and beyond. The arrival of the canals in 1770 and later on the growth and decline of the railways have gifted us a thread of open, green spaces that have been woven into the Calder Divide Trail.

At 45 miles the River Calder is not an epic natural feature and is one of 25 major rivers in Yorkshire shown in the black and white image below. The name ‘Calder’ comes from the Old Celtic language meaning ‘hard water’ or ‘river of stones’. Taking a boarder perspective, the River Calder is part of the Humber basin and, like so many others, it has been straightened, diverted and canalised by the demands of agriculture, industry and transport. A few wild places have been reclaimed so that on the river, below the surface and along the river bank life does thrive.

In the words of Nan Shepherd in ‘The Living Mountain’, “This is the river. Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself.”

The River Calder as it flows off Heald Moor

The River Calder as it flows near Copley village

The River Calder as it flows through Wakefield

The River Calder as it flows through the Lower Valley near Bottom Boat

The River Calder on the floodplain

The Landscape

  • Fourteen valleys form the catchment of the River Calder – including the Blackburne, Calder, Cragg Vale, Colne, Crimsworth Dean, Hebble Water, Hebden Water, Holme, Luddenden, Ryburn, Spen, Walsden and Wessenden.  

  • The semi-wild moorlands that form the Calder Divide watershed include;

    • Heald Flower Scar Flints Marsden Ogden

    • Norland Midgley Shore Inchfield Bride Stones

    • Chelburn Widdop March Haigh Wadsworth Blake

  • The valleys and floodplain cover an area of 957 square km /369 square miles.

  • Annual rainfall in Hebden Bridge is over 1,500 mm a year and in Castleford around 630 mm a year.

  • There are 39 reservoirs within the Calder Divide catchment.


Wildlife

  • Along the course of the Calder Divide Trail you may see:

    • Heron Badger Fox Deer Peacocks

    • Curlew Dipper Grouse Coot Geese

    • Kingfisher Stoat Otter Badger Field Mice

    • Meadow Pipit Emperor Moth Stonechat Green Woodpecker

    • Kestrel Barn Owl Buzzard Snipe Cormorant

    • Bats Beetles Water Voles Northern Hairy Ant

    • Bogbean Bilberry Gorse Cotton Grass Sedge Grass

The History

As well as the land, the river has long been a source of work and wealth. The first corn mill powered by the Luddenden Brook dates back to 1274 and the first fulling mill powered by the River Calder is dated to 1382. The opening of the Calder and Hebble Navigation in 1770 began the industrial transformation of the Upper and Lower Calder valleys and once the cuts and sections on the Rochdale Canal (1804) and Salterhebble branch (1828) were completed, hill top farms and the growing towns of Hebden Bridge, Halifax and Dewsbury were connected to a wider market via Castleford and Hull.

The People

The place names in the Lower and Upper Calder tell us about the people who first inhabited the area. From its Old English roots Dewsbury is ‘stronghold of man called Dewi’, Hebden is ‘valley where rose hips or brambles grow’, Holmfirth is ‘sparse woodland associated with the River Holme’, Luddenden is ‘valley of the loud stream’, Marsden is ‘boundary village’, Mirfield is ‘pleasant open land’, Mytholmroyd is ‘the clearing at the river mouth’, Slaithwaite is ‘clearing where timber is felled’ and Todmorden is ‘boundary valley of a man called Totta’.

Today the Lower and Upper Calder are home to around 800,000 people. Their diverse stories are partly told in the four brick panels shown below. The route of the CDT passes directly in front of these panels in Castleford.