Todmorden may be small – ‘out on a limb’ even, as one of the town’s 15,000 residents describes the moorland setting in the West Riding’s Calderdale Valley – but grandiose scenery is everywhere. Three steep, wooded valleys converge here, hastening the fall of dusk in winter. Fast-flowing Pennine rivers and the sombre Gauxholme Viaduct weave through the landscape, invoking the cotton mills of old.
This plucky place (a focus of rebellions against the Poor Laws in the 1600s) is also bursting with character, bonhomie – and vegetables. In
