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In 1799 that line was almost unbroken, from the College (where it commenced at Hunt’s Bank Bridge) to Red Bank. The little alley by the Town Mill, called Mill-brow, which led down to the wooden Mill Bridge, was little more of a gap than those narrow entries or passages which pierced the walls like slits here and there, and offered dark and perilous passage to courts and alleys, trending in steep incline to the very bed of the Irk. The houses themselves had been good originally, and were thus cramped together for defence in perilous times, when experience taught that a narrow gorge was easier held against warlike odds than an open roadway.

Ducie Bridge had then no existence, but Tanners’ Bridge—no doubt a strong wooden structure like that at Mill-brow—accessible from the street only by one of those narrow steep passages, stood within a few yards of its site, and had a place on old maps so far back as 1650. Its name is expressive, and goes to prove that the tannery on the steep banks of the Irk, behind the houses of Long Millgate opposite to the end of Miller’s Lane, was a tannery at least a century and a half before old Simon Clegg worked amongst the tan-pits, and called William Clough master.