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; “Why do milestones have benchmarks?” by Rob Westlake, Milestone Society Chairman and a former surveyor with the Ordnance Survey; and “Milestones on the Manchester, Bolton & Bury canal” by Dr Paul Hindle, author and retired university Senior Lecturer in Geography.

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