You might have seen that me and the brilliant artist Patrick Murphy have been doing a number of events in the last few weeks.

They’re called A Walk Around Town and were commissioned and funded by Barnsley Council’s Cultural Development Fund programme, called ‘Storying Barnsley’, via Arts Council England, who really do put a lot of money into Barnsley, and stories were what we were looking for, to make a series of alternative maps of the principal towns, and stories were certainly what we got!

The idea was that Patrick and went to a public space, usually a library but not always, and sat down with anybody who turned up and swapped stories about the locality, building up a kind of space-based narrative, a series of true and half-true and legendary tales that would make people visit the place and find out if there really was a vinegar distillery or a station that was called a Halt, presumably to make the trains stop. More about those later.

We went to Hoyland, Wombwell, Penistone, Goldthorpe, Cudworth and Royston and I can tell you that before we did these sessions I thought I knew a bit about these towns but it turned out that I knew nowt, and I learned such a lot.

Also, I had it reconfirmed to me that Barnsley is a borough built around communities, and that each of these communities has a different and powerful story, or series of stories, to tell about itself.

In Hoyland we sat in the new library and we heard about the chip shop that puts turns on, and Allott’s Corner, and we discussed where exactly Pilley was, because whenever I try to go there they seem to have moved it a bit, and we learned more about Harry Worth and of course Barry Hines loomed large in the conversation and I was able to point out, because Partick is far too modest, that he made the marvellous sculpture of Billy Casper that stands proudly on a green space in town.

In Wombwell we were in the Carnegie Library and a couple came from Norfolk who’d seen about the event on the Barnsley Libraries social media output and the man used to live near Wood Walk and, because he was a retired geography teacher, he’d drawn us a map of his old haunts including a pond he used to know, somewhere on the way to Hemingfield, that he called Perch Pond because there were fish in it, and Patrick later found the same pond on Google Earth in moment that sent a chill of excitement up my spine because it proved that, somehow, memory is good map-maker.

It was Penistone, in the splendid library there, where we heard about the aforementioned vinegar distillery, and we also heard about a hall called Water Hall where relatives of the poet William Wordsworth came from. ‘I never knew that!’ I said, a phrase I found myself saying a lot during these sessions. I imagined William wandering lonely as a cloud towards the Top of Dodworth Bottoms, notebook in hand.

In Goldthorpe we were in the newly-refurbished Dearne Playhouse, which really is jewel of a place, and that’s where the halt was that I talked about at the start of this column; it was a station called Goldthorpe and Thurnscoe Halt and it was between Harlington Halt and Grimethorpe Halt and it was opened in 1912 and shut in 1951 and I never had any knowledge of it until we did the session at the Playhouse.

In Cudworth we had a stroll around the beautiful park and we marvelled at the Peace Garden with its sculptures and, for some reason, we saw a betting shop pen stuck in a tree like an arrow might be and I want to put that in the maps that we eventually make because, well, it’s mysterious and memorable.

In Royston, at the library, we met the local history group who were so happy to talk about Royston that they all talked at once and almost overpowered me and Patrick with reams of joyful information. We made lists of local chip shops and pubs and butchers and we talked where the Wells were and where the Top End was.

It's been a privilege to be part of these story-gathering conversations, and if you’ve got any memories or stories to add about these towns, please email us at awalkaroundtownproject@gmail.com and your tales could be part of our maps.

We’ve got more rattle than a can o’mabs round here, and that’s a great thing!