1) A place-name near Holmfirth.
The diarist Oliver Heywood wrote in 1684 of a visit he made on horseback to New Mill, a former coal-mining area near Holmfirth. He lost his way in the snow and got intangled in a wood, among bogs, and very dangerous precipices: it was moonlight when he reached his destination, where his host told him that the wood was so full of pits … that its called Sinking Hills. It is still known as Sinking Wood and if the local story has any truth in it there must have been coal-pits there many centuries, since it was called synkynge wodd in a title deed of 1545. In the Thurstonland township book is a payment in 1778 to Mr Banks’s Colliers for searching Pit in Sinking Wood for Mary Firth.