Dean Head: The history behind incredible submerged village in Yorkshire that was turned into a reservoir

Dean Head was a village close to Huddersfield in the Dean Head Valley before it was flooded in the 1960s.

The M62 motorway crosses the dam and then passes through a cutting to the west over the Scammonden Bridge.

Historically, Scammonden or Dean Head was a township and chapelry covering more than 2,000 acres and in the 1870s it had a church, a Baptist chapel, a national school, a post office and 190 houses.

The industry in the village included cotton-spinning and woollen manufacturing and there were freestone quarries.

It became a civil parish in 1866 and had a population of 394 in 1931. The parish was abolished to form Colne Valley on April 1, 1937.

A motorway and dam across the Dean Head Valley was proposed in the early 1960s and work started in 1964.

The majority of the buildings in the village were demolished or submerged in the reservoir when it was filled in 1969 and geologists concluded that the church and school would become unsafe once the dam was full. The church school closed its doors in 1970 and is now a private residence.

Below Scammonden Road is an archaeological site of a late prehistoric settlement known as Meg Dyke.

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Dean Head reservoir was originally built to supply water to the factories in the Blackburn Valley that was downstream of the reservoir.

During the 1995 drought, the outlines of foundations of buildings in the village were visible to the public.

According to Yorkshire Water, Scammonden now holds 7.8 billion litres of water, enough to last one person 78 million days.

The Chapel of St Bartholomew still exists, as well as the old vicarage, which is now home to the Scammonden Sailing Club.

The area is now in the Kirklees district.