Time & Chance

Time and Chance is set at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a period of great change. The story is fictitious, but many of the events depicted did happen, if not in Cawthorne Basin, then not, so very far away. The news that the canal was to be built locally was not always welcomed. At the end of the eighteenth century, Cawthorne and Silkstone, like most villages of the time, were more or less closed off from the rest of the country. Travel by road could be hazardous and transport of goods by packhorse was expensive and inefficient. Nevertheless, for many, the canal was seen as a threat.