They are very cute and distracting but, no, it’s not those. If you enter the term cat steps into an online search engine, you are likely to come up with lots of adverts for sisal steps topped with cute looking cats and kittens. I walked up the steps through tranquil autumnal woodland and arrived in another realm, alongside the Hove Edge Club, just off the busy Halifax Road which was humming with traffic. From Cromwell Bottom to Hove Edge is a stretch of the imagination but secret these steps certainly were.
Eventually, hidden, at the edge of the woods above the farm were the 199 stone steps the Courier article promised. I took a hike from Brighouse, along the canal towpath, up Brookfoot, along Cow Lane and through the beautiful Red Beck Valley up to Sutcliffe Wood Farm, built by James Lister (yes, an ancestor of Anne Lister) in 1713.
The steps were not marked on any map I could find. How on earth could I get all the way from Cromwell Bottom up to Hove Edge, high above Brighouse, via a single set of steps? I searched and searched on my Ordnance Survey map, old maps from Local Studies and on Google Maps. Having grabbed my attention, I decided to find these cat steps. What caught my attention was a picture captioned ‘The high-walled secret passage of the “Catsteps” which link Cromwell Bottom with Hove Edge.’ I came across an old, 1978 Halifax Evening Courier article titled ‘Focus… takes a look at Brighouse’. However, I fell down a research hole as my colleague, Sarah would say.
My intention was to make a Local Studies walk about the Brighouse area. Just before the start of the November lockdown, I grabbed a load of books from our Local Studies Lending Collection and scanned in some more materials from our cuttings envelopes and Horsfall Turner reference collection.
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