Stott Hall Farm is a fairly well-known place in the north of England and has an interesting past. This house sits on a patch of land in the middle of the busy M62 - the road forks in front of it and narrows again after it.
This place is the subject of urban myths and legends. People who ride the M62, which connects Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, wonder: What is so special about this house that it even bifurcates the road? Maybe this is one of the obstinate owners who did not want to sell their land for the construction of a road? Here we discussed such cases in China - "One against all"
But no, here is a slightly different story …
The motorway was built in the 1960s. Rumors continue to circulate of a "quarrelsome farmer" who refused to sell his farm when plans for the highway were approved. They say that the builders had to find a way to get around the problem, so they just decided to build the road bypassing the farm, on both sides of it. The Quarterly Farmer's name was Ken Wilde. He lived on this farm with his wife Beth. And she tended the sheep. Only now he was not a rebel and did not oppose the huge highway.
The real reason why the house stayed where it was was revealed in a documentary filmed nearly 20 years after the road was built. The 1983 film Clegg's People, recently published by the British Film Institute, explains why the motorway could not be routed through the farm.
The point is a kind of "geological anomaly" in this area - there is such soil that after the calculations it turned out that it would be easier and cheaper to start up two roads bypassing this area than to lay one road through it.
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Ken Wilde and his wife Beth settled on this farm in 1934 and lived until their death. They always said that the noise of the highway did not bother them at all. Although Beth admitted that cleaning the house has become much more difficult due to the huge amount of dust. The couple also witnessed several terrible accidents that happened on the highway near their home. The closest danger came to them when a 10-meter truck overturned right in their yard at 4 am.
This farm is still operational today. Its new inhabitants are Jill Falkingham, her husband Paul Thorpe and their son John-William.
Jill moved here in 2009. The family completely renovated the old house (built in 1737, by the way!) And now Jill claims that life at Tott Hall is quite normal.
“Yes, there is a lot of traffic here, but it's always windy, so pollution is minimal,” she says. - We have triple glazing in our house. So it's no different from living anywhere else where there is a road."
Students from the University of Huddersfield took soil and air samples - and indeed it turned out that pollution was surprisingly low. The only thing that can be really annoying is the constant noise. According to Jill, he gets on the nerves. But she emphasizes that she still enjoys living in this unusual house: “Many people say that this is a bleak place and that it looks like Wuthering Heights from Emily Brontë's novel, but I don't see it. I think it's beautiful here."