25 April 2025

A lovely sunny day greeted the Society members who came to the meeting at Gargrave: a good day with very interesting speakers and lots of questions/involvement from the audience.

The guest speaker was Jenny Hill, Lead Curator at the award-winning Craven Museum in Skipton: “Behind the Scenes at Craven Museum – how do we look after a collection of 60,000 objects?” The museum was currently holding an exhibition on milestones, arranged in conjunction with the Society.

This was followed by three presentations:

“Milestone restoration around Port William” by Scottish member Jacqueline Crowther; known locally in her Dumfries and Galloway home as the “milestone fairy”, her good works include ensuring that her milestones continue to be visible after ger initial intervention. The photo shows a typically unhelpful milestone marking 10 miles to Port William (P) and two arrows to W places: Wigtown and Whithorn.

“Why do milestones have benchmarks?” by Rob Westlake, Milestone Society Chairman and a former surveyor with the Ordnance Survey; some milestones have not just one, but sometimes two or even three. They were obviously useful in more than just one way.

“Milestones on the Manchester, Bolton & Bury Canal” by Dr Paul Hindle, author and retired university Senior Lecturer in Geography. He provided before and after photographs of this much redeveloped area.

The afternoon was mainly a discussion session on “Hunting milestones”, preceded by Dr Hindle on “Using historic maps for research” and Hilary Jones, Society vice-chair on “The challenges of finding milestones on site”.

RWH / April 2025