winterhedge

1) The dialect word for a clothes-horse. It was formerly the practice to place clothes over a hedge or furze bush to dry but that was not always possible in winter.

1791 Edmond Dysons wife ... having wash’d and gone to the Clothes Hedge with her clothes was found dead, Slaithwaite. The word is recorded as winter hedge in a Holmfirth inventory of 1799 and a winter edge 2 foot 6 inches high was advertised for sale in a Spen Valley newspaper of 1986.

places Slaithwaite
dates 1791

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Photo by Kreuzschnabel CC BY-SA 3.0