Ledsham, West Yorkshire

Ledsham is a village and civil parish 4 miles (6 km) north of Castleford and 11 miles (18 km) east of Leeds in the county of West Yorkshire, England. The village is in the City of Leeds metropolitan borough and near to the A1 Great North Road. It has a population of 162,[1] increasing to 181 at the 2011 Census.[2]

A game of Cricket in Ledsham, 2003 (note church spire in the background)

Etymology

Ledsham is first mentioned in a charter of around 1030 in the form Ledesham. Like nearby Ledston, the name seems to refer to Leeds (or the Old English precursor of this name, Loidis, which denoted a region rather than a town); the second element is the Old English word hām ('homestead, farm'). The name thus meant 'the farm belonging to the region of Loidis'.[3]

Ledsham parish once also included the township of Fairburn, whose name is likewise first attested around 1030, as Faren-burne. This name comes from the Old English words fearn ('fern') and burna ('spring, stream'), and thus meant 'spring characterised by ferns'.[4]

Charactistics

There is a late seventh-century Anglo-Saxon church (the oldest church and the oldest building standing in West Yorkshire),[5] and nearby Ledston Hall. The village school, like schools in Collingham and Thorp Arch, is named after Lady Elizabeth Hastings.

Ledsham have a cricket team, who currently play in the Wetherby League.[6]

gollark: It's a blower card or something and therefore loud and hot.
gollark: No, use TWO of them in SLI.
gollark: Duct-tape a GTX 1050 on the back.
gollark: We should probably not go for a secret proprietary algorithm.
gollark: CPU mining might kind of be better for that, since there is less disparity in CPU capability, I think.

References
  1. Office for National Statistics : Census 2001 : Parish Headcounts : Leeds retrieved 2009-09-10
  2. "Civil parish population 2011". Neighbourhood Statistics. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  3. Victor Watts (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. LEDSHAM WYorks.
  4. Harry Parkin, Your City's Place-Names: Leeds, English Place-Name Society City-Names Series, 3 (Nottingham: English Place-Names Society, 2017), p. 45.
  5. 1987 publication by West Yorkshire Archaeology Service: HC/2/SW,CP "Historic Churches of West Yorkshire - Ledsham Church"
  6. Ledsham Cricket Club Archived 2012-03-04 at the Wayback Machine



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