Origins Of Burley One

The houses were built in 1752 - that's what it used to say, inscribed in stone, over one of the doorways - mostly of stone, although a few were of brick. I was told that at one time the houses had been servants' houses, possibly for those working at 'The Grange' just outside the Village...

Oddly enough Burley's 'Village Green', the patch of grass bounded by Burley Road and the Village Street, used to be the only part of Burley that wasn't green. People whose memories go back before the 1960's talk, not about crossing the green, but about going 'across the Village'. For that's what used to be there: a foot or so lower than the present grass, surrounded by a high stone wall, approached only by steep steps: the first built-up area of Burley.

The cottages were very small and built of stone with wee windows and doors. Narrow cobbled roads separated the dwellings from their gardens which were a glorious muddle of foliage, roses, sunflowers, hollyhock and lilac. Leeds Corporation have gone to the trouble of creating an early Victorian village within the walls of the Abbey museum, when they had the authentic article in Burley Village!

But the history of the area goes back further than the 1750's. The name Burley probably derives from 'burh leah', meaning a wooded glade, and that's what it originally was: an area of fields and woodland sloping down to the River Aire.

The name first appears in the 12th Century when the son of William Pictavensis de Heddingleia, the man who had donated land to the original monks of Kirkstall Abbey, two miles upstream, gave the Abbey a present of a toft in Burley. Burley then, and for many centuries afterwards, was the name given to the entire 'wooded glade' from the Abbey to Leeds. The Burley Bar Stone (preserved in the Leeds and Holbeck Building Society in Albion Street) marked the western boundary of Leeds.

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