Milner Field excavations

I've posted before about the 'lost house' at Milner Field, a grand Victorian mansion built in the 1870s as a family home for Titus Salt Jnr. (See HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.)  I'd read that over the past year or so a group of people had taken it upon themselves to start to excavate the site. I thought I'd go and look what they'd done. I've not been up there for over a year so I'd not seen any of their hard work - and wow, what a difference they've made. We can skirt around the knotty issue of whether they should be excavating at all... They maintain that the site is owned by a dormant company, is lying neglected and that it should be 'cared for' and rediscovered. Others perhaps disagree and think it should be explored only by professional archeologists or left alone to be reclaimed by nature as has been happening since most of it was demolished in the 1950s. Nevertheless, what has been uncovered is fascinating. 

Here are the remains of the grand arched entrance that led to the house from the carriage drive that comes up through the woods from Saltaire. The arch opened into a large courtyard in front of the main doorway to the house. Here, visitors would be helped from their carriages and welcomed into the house, before the horses were led away to be stabled. Visitors included, in 1882, Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. 

Much of the excavation work is taking place at the 'domestic' end of the house, where the kitchens and servants rooms were. Several staircases have been uncovered: 

 Fragments of floors: 

A fireplace and its yellow tiled hearth in the kitchen: 

At the other end of the house, the mosaic floor of the huge conservatory has been visible for years but has been cleared of weeds and swept, so that you can now see its outline much better. 

The long corridor - the orangery - between the house and the conservatory has been unearthed:

as has the doorway that led back into the main house: 

These steps were part of the garden, leading up to long-vanished lawns. In the intervening years trees have taken over the whole site, roots writhing through the old stonework. It's not clear what the plans are once all these areas have been uncovered. It is and remains quite a dangerous site, and the digging may well be leaving some of the trees in a more precarious position than when there was more soil to root into... Hopefully the vision for it is a long-term one and not just a whim that people will tire of once the initial excitement has passed.  

PS: Since I originally wrote this, I believe that the excavation work has been stopped. The local History Club were against it and it seems the landowners may have stepped in to halt the unauthorised work. 

Try Googling 'Milner Field' if you'd like more info and photos. There's quite a lot to see, plus some info on Wikipedia HERE. 

I'm adding this old photo of the house just for the record. It's possibly still copyright to somebody, though I think copyright runs out after 70 years and it is older than that. It's a well-known pic. You can see it was a very 'heavy-looking' house, in Victorian Gothic style. The domestic areas that are being excavated are to the right of this photo and the orangery leading to the conservatory is the bit on the far left.