I was interested to see the claim in last week's Keighley News that there was a mill at Lees in 1571. The same claim is made on an information board in Cross Roads Park but there the mill is said to have been on the site of Cross Roads Co-op rather than at Lees Syke.

Neither claim is very likely to be true – the first textile mills in Yorkshire were not built until 200 years after that date.

The only mills in existence in the sixteenth century were corn mills and fulling mills. We know that there was a corn and/or fulling mill at Mill Hey in the fourteenth century. John the son of Simon of Lees was killed in an accident there in 1355. A corn mill still stood in the railway station yard until around 1970.

The site of Cross Roads Co-op was still a field in 1847. The mill at Lees Syke was built in 1844. The building now known as Damside Mill was a later addition – probably after the fire which destroyed much of the original mill in 1885.

STEVEN WOOD Stone Street, Haworth