South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 14 May 1949
Round your Way – the Houghtons
Where the Rotherham road dips and rises out of Darfield you will find two speed restriction signs and a colony of newly erected prefabs. This is the beginning of Little Houghton, standing in attendance to her sister beyond the hill, Great Houghton. Like many other corners of South Yorkshire, Little Houghton and Great Houghton were farming communities before the coming of the mines, and even the passage of time since then has done little to change this essential character. They are removed from the hurly-burly of modern life. If you want to find it, you must go to the end of the street and catch a bus.
If ever you are in one of the quieter corners and out a few minutes to spare, find a little shop window, setting the wall, and you will find a complete pocket edition of the weeks social diary. There too, you will find others of the threads that go to make the pattern of a more rural South Yorkshire. You’ll find a note on the choir’s Festival, coming events at the Women’s Institute, and contact with neighbouring towns in signs announcing “The local office…” For a score of services not immediately available, but always on tap.
All houses and drivers have come together with a clean joint at great Houghton, so that they seem part of the original rather than an afterthought. You approach on him then, past the attractive welfare Institute on your right, and a school on your left, and your short journey along a narrow winding road, taking trim gardens, occasional shops, standing back from the pathway, social centres and farmyards in your stride. You approach on a bend, and you leave on a bend, a long right hand bend that ends with the flame of gorse on Brearley Common. Houghton folk have a playground for picnics on their doorstep.
The pits are left behind over your shoulder, and your last impression of Great Houghton will be coloured by the fleeting glimpses of haystacks and farm carts, and the sight and sound of ducks on the pond in the fields.
Great Houghton is indeed a happy setting for agricultural show time and the Old Hall, weathered green and white, an ideal backcloth for one of the district’s biggest events of the year. Houghton, like neighbouring Brearley still has time to stand and stare.