Much of August spent trying to find this little place near Skipton, Cawder Ghyll, where I was born. The maternity hospital there closed years ago and no-one seemed to remember it. Searching online I found only quotations from Blake Morrison's book, 'Things My Mother Never Told Me ' - I knew already that his mother was the midwife, his father our GP. Then another online search produced an estate agent's advert for a house at Cawder Ghyll, BD23 2QG - with a map.
We followed the Keighley Road out of Skipton town centre and soon found that we were walking alongside the Leeds Liverpool Canal, back towards Leeds in fact, and so switched to the towpath, watching ducks waddle in and out of the cottage gardens, and crossed each bridge to look for signs on the lanes which meandered off up the hillsides. Over a humpbacked bridge we'd passed under by barge just days before we found first Cawder Lane then Cawder Ghyll. No old buildings remained, just a small cul-de-sac of new houses where the lane runs out, then nothing but fields and those soft hills which have always seemed strangely familiar as I've passed them by rail or road.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cawder_Gill_-_geograph.org.uk_-_308119.jpg
.. also nearby are the remains of the Iron Age settlement at Horse Close Hill (Cawder Hall Enclosure):
http://megalithix.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/horseclosehill-skipton/
