A curious tale of how Walton went from nature hub to industrial village

However, while many villages across Yorkshire have mentions or connections to The Domesday Book - here there is a nod to what was going on in Walton as early as the seventh century.

The name Walton is fairly common in England. Several villages have the same name which is thought to refer to ‘village of the Welsh’.

So, a settlement was already in existence when the Saxons arrived in the 7th century and we can see how the name Walton developed over the years from Weala-tun in Saxon days, Waleton in the Domesday Book, Waton in Norman times and then Walton in the Middle Ages and onwards.

The early Lords of Walton were the de Burghs and the village stayed with them for seven generations until the 1400s, when, it passed to John Waterton in 1435 upon his marriage to heiress Constance.

It was at this time that the first Walton Hall was built.

It was demolished in 1767 and led to the Georgian mansion we know today being built in its place on an island in a lake. That, if we jump forward for a moment is now part of the four star hotel and golf course complex, known as Waterton Park Hotel & Spa and Walton Hall.

A few years later, Charles Waterton was born at Walton Hall, not the hotel. He would later become a famous naturalist, taxidermist, a noted explorer and national, as well as local, celebrity.

He also created at Walton, the world’s first nature reserve.

After education, Charles Waterton travelled extensively and, being a skilled taxidermist, he preserved many of the animals he encountered on his expeditions to places such as Guyana and Brazil.

When he returned to Walton Hall in 1820, he built a wall around three miles of the estate and upon turning it into the world's first wildfowl and nature reserve, he made himself one of the world's first environmentalists.

He also invented the bird nesting box and owned a dog which was prominent in the foundation of the modern English Mastiff and may be traced back to in the pedigrees of all living dogs of this breed.

In 1829, at the age of 47, he married 17-year-old Anne Edmonstone who died shortly after giving birth to their son, Edmund, when she was only 18.

He was an early opponent of pollution and fought a long-running court case against the owners of a soap works that had been set up near his estate and emitted poisonous chemicals that damaged trees and polluted the lake. He was eventually successful in having the soap works moved.

Waterton died in 1865 after fracturing his ribs and injuring his liver in a fall on his estate.

However, in what seems a polar opposite to his philosophy, within the next 60 years coal was coming.

In the midst of this, the local history account of Walton Hall is interrupted to recall when a murder was committed in the village in 1880.

It reads: “Tom and Hannah Beckett lived in a two-roomed house in Soap House Yard. On his return from work as a farm hand Tom found his wife about to go out with her lover, Harry Ogden from Newmillerdam. After an argument he cut her throat with a razor and then his own. They were found later by the lodger, Mr Marshall. Tom Beckett later recovered in Clayton Hospital to eventually face the consequences of his violent crime, but his wife had paid a high price for being unfaithful and was reported dead at the scene.”

By 1890, the peaceful and nature rich environment of Walton was set to become dark and dusty.

Walton Colliery (then known as Sharlston West) was sunk in 1890, employed 1,285 men underground and 298 on the surface and was producing 2,200 tonnes a day.

In what will still be remembered by many readers, disaster would strike in 1959 at the colliery and killing five people. An underground explosion was caused by arcing from a damaged power cable at the coalface igniting the methane gas in the atmosphere.

Eventually, Walton Colliery closed in December 1979, leading to the loss of 550 jobs.

There has been a lot of work and campaigning since then to recapture the focus on the preservation of the environment that The Squire, Charles Waterton had started.

In 1969, a plan was put forward by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to use Walton Hall for a Natural History Museum and it was also hoped to lease part of the canal for conservation in a nature trail for children in conjunction with the project.

Further to that, in 1974, applications from Walton Park Development Company to convert the Hall, Park and Lake into a Leisure Centre and Outdoor Pursuits Centre was rejected because it was thought that Walton residents would not benefit from a club which would be exclusive and expensive to join, and it was felt the development would harm trees and wildlife, destroy farmland and lead to devalued property.

However, in what seems to have come full circle, the former colliery site has been turned into a nature reserve. Large lakes were constructed when the reserve was landscaped in the mid 1990s and the excavated earth was then used to cover the colliery's vast spoil heaps.

It is now home to 100,000 native trees including cherry, oak, willow, ash, birch and hazel.

There are some fine exampled that suggest nature is now re-occupying the site, from the five-spot Burnett moths, to the herons, toads and dragonflies and the sparrowhawks that flit through the thriving woodlands.