Wath-upon-Dearne
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Wath-upon-Dearne, also known as Wath-on-Dearne or simply Wath, is a small town on the south side of the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire, lying 5 miles north of Rotherham, close to mid-way between Barnsley and Doncaster.
History
Wath can trace its existence back to Norman times, having an entry in the Domesday book. For hundreds of years it remained a quiet rural settlement astride the junction of the old Doncaster-Barnsley and Rotherham-Pontefract roads. Until the 1840s the town was home to a racecourse of regional importance; the course later fell into disuse although traces of the original track can easily be found between Wath and Swinton and its memory is left in local street names. There also was a pottery at Newhill, close to deposits of clay, although this always lived under the shadow of the nearby Rockingham Pottery in Swinton.
High quality bituminous coal had also been dug out of outcrops and near-surface seams in primitive bell-pits for many hundreds of years, and it was the development of the deep-mining industry from the 19th Century that was to affect the area the most. Several high-grade coal seams are close to the surface in this area of South Yorkshire, including the prolific Barnsley seam. The population of the area swelled and the local infrastructure was developed for the coal industry. The local economy became overly reliant on this one single industry; this was to store up problems for the future.
The Dearne and Dove Canal was built to access the local collieries and passed through the town just to the south of the High Street on a large embankment with a large turning pound known locally as the 'Bay of Biscay'. This was closed in stages from 1934 to 1961 and much of the line of the canal was used for road improvement works in the late 1960s and again in 1985 (named 'Biscay Way').
By the 20th century heavy industry was evident in the area with many large, busy collieries and a large modern colliery complex, coal preparation and coking plant at nearby Manvers, which was visible and detectable by nose from miles around.
Rail took over from the canal as a means of transporting coal out of the area, and Wath-upon-Dearne became a railfreight centre of national importance. One of the biggest and for its time most modern railway marshalling yards in the UK was built in the early 20th century. It was one of the eastern ends of the trans-Pennine Manchester-Sheffield-Wath electrified line (also known as the Woodhead Line), a project which spanned the Second World War. It also once had three railway stations, and still had two in the mid-1960s (Wath Central and Wath North), although neither survived the decade.
The local coal industry was at the forefront of the sudden dramatic decline of the British coal mining industry, which was precipitated by a change of government economic policy in the early 1980s. This had very severe knock-on effects in the many reliant local industries, and caused much local hardship. The 1985 miners' strike was sparked by the impending closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Brampton Bierlow, a neighbouring village. Along with the whole of the Dearne Valley, Wath was classified as an impoverished area and received much public money, including European funds. These were put into regenerating the area from the mid-nineties onward causing a certain amount of economic revival, and changing the character of the area to be more rural as large areas of ex-industrial land was turned back into countryside, dotted with light industrial and commercial office parks.
Today
Wath-upon-Dearne is centred on Montgomery Square, where the town's main shops, library and bus station are located. Immediately West is the substantial Norman All Saints Church, in a small leafy green with the Town Hall, the Montgomery Hall and a campus of the Dearne Valley College.
The town no longer has a direct rail link, although there has been talk of opening a station on the Sheffield-Wakefield-Leeds line at Manvers, roughly a mile from the town centre.
Population
Population figures published in the early 1960s give the population of the town as being in the region of 14,000. The figure of 7,545 given in the infobox is the population of the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham Wath-upon-Dearne ward at the 2001 census, minus one area that is geographically a part of Swinton but included in the Wath ward for convenience. Although there has been a slight reduction in population of the area recently, the discrepancy in the figures is difficult to explain: it is possible that the population of the neighbouring settlements of West Melton and Brampton Bierlow were included in the older larger figure, since these were in the former Wath-upon-Dearne urban district.
External links
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