The Ballad of Little Beck was an informal, one-off presentation by Steve Bottoms and Eddie Lawler for Saltaire Festival, 2018. This performed walking tour, from Roberts Park up to Milner Field mansion, is described in some detail in this blog post — which also contains a number of photos of the event. Posted below, though, are some fragmentary video clips, which were surreptitiously filmed by Ruth Bartlett without us even knowing she was doing it… (thanks Ruth) They’re presented here as something simply caught in the moment, as if on the wind…

The Ballad of Little Beck was a celebration of poetry in the landscape, and in the first clip, above, Eddie is heard singing part of Ben Preston’s dialect poem “Come to thy Gronny” — which he had set to his own musical arrangement. Preston was the founder of the Glen Pub, up in Gilstead, and the song was performed on a path leading uphill towards it, although we turned west along Sparable Lane before getting to Gilstead itself. “Come to thy Gronny” is a touching poem, spoken in the voice of a grandmother to her illegitimate granchild – at a time in the 19th century when “bastards” were often outcast socially.

In this second clip, we’re on Sparable Lane itself, as the path crosses over Little Beck (the small stream that flows down from Gilstead to meet the River Aire near Bradford Rowing Club). Gilstead falls within the parish of Bingley, and here Steve performs a section of John Nicholson’s poem “Bingley’s Beauties” (aka “On Bingley”). Nicholson, another Victorian-era poet from this area, was a recurring figure on the tour – since we opened (in Roberts Park) with another poem of his on the beauties of Airedale, and finished (in the bar of the Rowing Club) with his “On a Landlord” — also newly set to music by Eddie.

Finally here are two (fragmentary) clips from the walk’s climactic stop in the ruins of Milner Field mansion — as built for Titus Salt Jr. in the 1870s. Above, Steve tries to describe what was once here, while below, Eddie sings part of his own song “The Ballad of Little Beck”, from which we took the title for the tour (originally written for our Salt’s Waters audio guide). Little Beck flows through the Milner Field estate, and was once dammed to create a boating lake for the Salts. The song voices Eddie’s thoughts about how the beck might have felt about this…

So there you have it. This is informal, scratchy documentation of a relaxed, one-time-only, never-even-been-rehearsed event. We hope it stands, nonetheless, as a record of something that will be memorable for those who participated.