The story of oddly-named 'Millindale'
'MILLINDALE' is the unusual name of the short road, in the centre of Maltby, which links High Street to Blyth Road.
Historically, the name lies at the eastern limit of the old village and what makes it fascinating to a local historian is that it originally distinguished not a street but a topographical feature.
If you look beyond Millindale's frontages, a steep sided valley is revealed out of which, the locally notorious breath-catcher, Carlyle Road, climbs towards the Model Village.
This dale's eastern side is so steep that it was never brought into cultivation and the oldest written records of the area show a jumble of properties built on what was technically 'manorial waste'.
'Dale' is a place-name element of Scandinavian origin so that bit of our name could easily be as old as the Danish 'Maltby', which is first found in Domesday Book.
The 'Millin' bit presents more of a puzzle. Logically it would apply to a mill but a search of old maps and plans initially failed to reveal one anywhere near.
In the 1980s, this street/feature name set me off on a lengthy research project which, by tracing the site and changing tenure of every mapped and listed mill in the valley of Maltby Dike over a period of 900-or-so years, revealed a 'lost' water mill site in Maltby village.
This was situated lower down the 'dale' in question. When seventeenth century documents revealed that the local dialect term for a mill was 'miln', pronounced 'mill-un', our 'Millindale'.
At last made sense as 'the steep sided valley associated with the mill'.
-Alice Rodgers, Maltby Local History Society.
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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