Where & What Were The Laireys?

Where & What Were The Laireys?

A better question...Where did the name come from?

This is a pic of what remains of The Laireys. Drive down Carlisle Street and hang a right at The Malting House pub and there is the bit of The Laireys that remains..the rest has factories on it. It was suggested on Facebook that perhaps this was once a farm but I doubt it. If it was a farm it would be shown as such on the Ordnance Survey map. On the O.S. map of 1897 it is shown as a rifle range. .

My thoughts were that to be leery is to be suspicious or cautious, which you would be if you were walking in the area of a rifle range. Over time that could morph into lairy.
To be lairy means to be aggressive and anti-social, so perhaps parents named it The Laireys to discourage school children from using it as a short cut. We do know, anecdotally, that parents did discourage children from using it, but that was probably to do with it being a place where a nonce might lurk.
Anyway, perseverance has prevailed. I was aware that this was a route from the Pattinson school that became the Catholic school largely used by Irish emigrants so I sought an Irish derivation
Bingo
'As lairy as a wolf' is Irish meaning 'afraid' but in the positive sense of 'alert, watchful and cautious' rather than the negative sense of 'cowardly'

Dogged perseverance got me there.. that's why I'm a local historian

The Cumbrians in The Felling's History

                                     Map of Cumberland & Westmoreland

Perhaps the best known Cumbrian who came to The Felling is Rev. John Hodgson but there are a number of others who made their mark. (Of course there were also lots of others who did not make their mark, like my Grandma on my Dad's side and my Great Grandad on my Mam's side, who gave up being a scarecrow to work down the pit.)

This is me with my Great Grandad

Hugh Lee Pattinson
Dept Store Felling High Street
John Grundy

The Quarries Were Where the Green Bits Are Now

The Quarries were where The Felling green bits are now. That's not a guarantee but its a knocking bet if the green bit is in the middle of a built up area. 

If houses could have been built there they would have been. The big exception is the Oliver Henderson Park which could not be built on but not because of quarrying

The last working quarry in Felling closed in 1972. When they started is unknown but goes back at least to Roman times. In written records times, we can go back to
 1478 when "gryndstones" were quarried from under the Hayning (large wooded area)

Per Joan Hewitt (JH), not just a well versed local historian but the granddaughter of a quarry owner,  there was "a great sweep of carboniferous sandstone known as the Heworth Band".

In 1807 twelve separate quarries were listed in Heworth Chapelry rates book. 

The biggest was that of Richard Kell and Co and the last was that of Tate Brown & Co. (Brown being JH's grandfather)

The High Burn hole was very deep, water filled and dangerous, the stone of increasingly poor quality. In about 1948 a young lad drowned. The quarry finally closed in 1952.
After filling with Heworth Colliery pit waste it became Felling Cricket Club.

Felling Park is another obvious one. (Felling Park also had a colliery shaft, another reason for it not being built on)

Heworth Low Burn Quarry was worked on until 1970  and eventually became a cemetery
The Bankies was formerly a quarry as was the Windy Nook Nature Park