The first story was of Henry Ploughman as told to him by the Mallard brothers, Freddie and Frank.  In 1804 Henry worked on the tunnelling for the canal.  Having too much to drink the night before, he felt sick one Friday and left the work place to walk home down the toll road (Stoke Road).  He met the horse and wagon coming up the road with the pay-day cash and flagged it down to not miss out on being paid.  He and the driver passed the time of day and, when finished, he bid the driver farewell and went home to lie down.  When the wagon got to the tunnellers, the driver realised that the tailboard was hanging loose. What was worse was that a bag containing half-sovereigns and some silver was missing. The driver, seeing trouble brewing among the men, mentioned he had met Henry on the way up and that he was not well.  So a party of workers wasted no time in going down to his house to see if Henry had found the bag lying in the road.  Henry invited the men to search his house, telling them he knew nothing of the bag.  However, a few months afterwards, Henry left the village, to be never seen again.  He did the right thing by the villagers though; he cleared all his debts in the village shops - in some cases paying them off with half-sovereigns.  Perhaps the Grand Junction Canal Company later got him a free passage to Australia!

The second relates to when Fred's brother Earnest travelled to Barnsley to pick up and drive home a Fowler Road Loco steam traction engine, the one with compound spring mountings for a smooth ride.  While rumbling through Sheffield, taking advantage of the springs, he was stopped and fined for doing 4 mph where, over cobbles, he should have been doing only 2 mph.  With what seems to be reverse psychology, the police provided a placard to hang on the front of the boiler which stated he may do 15 mph - so that he could depart Barnsley and complete the homeward journey quickly.  At that speed something was bound to go wrong.  He broke a spoke and veered into the side of a bridge, destroying 30 feet of iron railings but managed to stay on the road.

And one from a village veteran: Around about 1930, a group of 8 lads walked for fun up the centre of a frozen canal from the mill to the ironstone bridge.  They realised that as they got nearer to the bridge the ice was getting thinner.  With the object of proving their bravery very much in their minds, they dared each other to keep edging forward until one fell in and had to be hauled out onto the field side. Luckily he was the one with a coat many sizes too big for him and the extra trapped air under the coat probably saved his life.  There followed a cold trudge home, up the bank, round by the Stoneworks and across the allotments field, heading for the railway cottages.  By that time the coat was swinging off the lads shoulders - frozen solid!

In those days they must have been as tough as the ice was thick!