SCARTOP Charity used to be known as “t’Coppin’- on Charity”, thanks to the number of couples who used the occasion to strike-up relationships!

It is easy to see why, given the informal nature of this Edwardian Charity, reflecting writer Halliwell Sutcliffe’s 1899 description of “the hillside lassies, gowned in white”, occupying a “rough platform” together with “the fiddles, the bass-viols and the clarionets”, while the congregation overflowed the Ponden Mill yard and “sprinkled the hill-slope opposite with spots of colour, white and black”.

One Edwardian visitor estimated an attendance of nearly 2,000, rather eccentrically from the collection comprising “four sovereigns, 12 half-sovereigns, one postal order for 10s, 26 half-crowns, 18 florins, 83 shillings, 136 sixpences, 339 threepenny pieces, 693 pennies and 254 half-pennies.”

Even assuming each worshipper contributed a single coin, this still comes to only 1,566!