Stoodley Pike

This eye-catching monument on the Pennine Way stands 1,310 feet above sea level and some 120 feet high on the crest of a windswept hill. It was erected to commemorate the surrender of Paris to the Allied Armies in March 1814: during the Napoleonic Wars the export of cloth was greatly hampered and there was also a genuine fear of a French invasion. Paid for by public subscription, it was completed in 1815, the year of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. It collapsed in 1854 (a fact linked by the superstitious with the outbreak of the Crimean War) and was rebuilt by a local architect, James Green, as an obelisk on a square base. Text from: Calderdale Architecture and History