Westwood

You can certainly get attached to a space.

That is the case with me and The Westwood.

It is a rare bit of land. A long surviving bequest of common ground held in trust for a townspeople. It dominates almost the whole of the western boundary of the historic settlement of Beverley, not in an overpowering or controlling way but as a protective tract against what has been an incessant pressure for expansion of housing, commerce and industry.

On my first ever sight of The Westwood, sometime in the mid to late 1970's I was over-awed by its wide, open and undulating presence.

We, as a family, were just passing through on return from a holiday and parked up on the grassy side of one of the metalled roads that weave their way through the pasture. The rattle of the car tyres and of those carrying the towed caravan over the span of the cattle grid were a gruff staccato announcement of something different. The guttural sound caused me to look up with jaded eyes from a long drive.

There was a large expanse of verdant green with a backdrop of reddish brick under plum coloured slate roofs, the bright almost white towering mass of the Gothic Minster and a lot of bright blue sky to a distant horizon.

Slow moving, lumbering shapes and far off specks that I could make out in the dazzling summer sunlight were grazing cattle, a lot of them. There was a cluster of youths kicking a football towards a solitary set of goalposts seemingly in the middle of nowhere, huddles of golfers seeking out dimpled Slazengers in the rough clumps astride the well manicured and watered fairways and greens, gals on ponies lolloping around the sandy track of the training gallop, a Crufts-like collection of assorted dogs and their owners, walkers, family groups on picnic, kids on bikes, couples hand in hand emerging out of the bushes, more dogs, cars abandoned in a random manner in the shade of the avenues of horse chestnut trees, litter pickers and a snaking line of sweltering general public awaiting their turn at the small sliding aperture on the cream and blue Burgess Ice Cream Van.

I was not to know that this brief stopover was a precursor for an actual relocation of the family a couple of years later to a house just on the Westwood Road making the pasture into an extension of the back garden and a backdrop to my formative years.

In the following years I spent many, many tens of hours within the broad boundaries of the common.
Our first family dog, Sheba, would disappear in yelping excitement into the thick undergrowth around the excavated chalk pits in pursuit of rabbits. I was on dog walking duty in the dusk and after dark hours. I would often just walk home without Sheba out of sheer frustration for not being able to coax her back to the leash or physically corner and capture her. My whistling technique was finely honed in the fading evening light or pitch black farther out beyond the streetlights with just the stars or a full moon for illumination.

The Westwood was all things to me.

I could just go out for a run to get rid of excess energy or teenage angst. The middle Newbald Road hill was a great training route when I first thought about cycling competitively. Walking the miles helped me to memorise my essays for exams. The Black Mill Tower was a good target towards which to whack a golf ball with my second hand bought pitching iron, yet more adolescent angst to tackle. Bouncing a football off the crossbar of the lonely goalposts was a constant challenge.  Five days a week in school term I criss-crossed the Westwood on my way to and from school sites and home dinners.

A summer job, voluntarily, was to carefully apply linseed oil to the large hand written boards on which were sign written the rules, regulations, by-laws, entitlements and obligations for Freemen and Women of the town. One of the Pasture Masters, a wizened, hardy and grumpy old man lived at the top of the road in a tied cottage and was definitely not someone you would hope to tangle with or upset.

 I got a good snog on the Westwood. Dressing up as a monk and beckoning motorists with skeletal hand when caught in the full beam of their headlights was a bit of a prank. A bright spotlight on a steamed up parked car caused quite a flurry of activity.

O I did a dissertation on the role of the Westwood in the history of Beverley which highlighted the location of tumuli and where an iron age chariot had been excavated. Snow brought out the sledges, fertiliser sacks and the posers with skis and a ski lift on Hill 66.

Mid week in the spring and summer months and on some saturdays there were horse racing meets at the racecourse on the north side of the Westwood. In the winter I took part in cyclo-cross races up and down the dips and slopes. Visitors were taken to see the huge iron ring to which bulls were tethered for the barbaric practice of baiting with dogs and where, following heavy rainfall the ground would erupt with freshwater springs and flood around York Road. Did I say that I got a good snog on the Westwood?

Two of my children were born in Westwood Hospital.

Two of my friends died from careering their motorbikes into the static obstacles of heifers and trees.

My father helped to raise funds to put reflective collars on the cattle to counter strikes from vehicles and my other two wheeled contemporaries. Mother still walks mile upon mile with Maisie the dog in a perfect blend of exercise and joyful celebration of freedom.

We have had family blessings and commemorations at the position of a tree planted and tended by my parents way out close to the Burton Bushes woodland.

The above, and countless other of my experiences, snogging and otherwise, encouraged me to put my signature on the current petition to try to prevent an incursion on the sacred open space by developers seeking to convert the Beverley Union Workhouse into apartments and bulldoze the modern hospital buildings for non-descript speculative housing of sorts.

It is intended to be a temporary measure of a roadway for construction traffic but it represents  a threat and a dangerous precedent to whittle away at the precious pasture. Signatories are not NIMBY's or Luddites but those with a real and deep fondness for the Westwood, for all that it represents and its contribution over the millenia to the people of Beverley and those who have trodden its broad acres.