You won't find Hepolite Scar on any map of Bradford - not even on the older ones - because that wasn't its name.

But our mention of Jowett cars last week brought the name of the scar back to the surface for those who recall the early days of motor sport in the city.

Jowetts were keen competitors on the bone-jarring, spring-rupturing pile of rock and quarry rubble above Bolton Woods and overlooking Canal Road.

The scar was owned by Jowetts and designed for those to whom the smell of petrol and gearbox oil is a heady perfume and the clatter of an unsilenced engine is a symphony. It was where, particularly in the 1920s, the sports car freaks and motorbike madmen met on Saturday afternoons and it was usually crowded with spectators.

It wasn't always a barren hill. Once Bolton Woods lived up to its name and trees blanketed the hillside. But they were chopped down for some forgotten First World War project and the hill was left bare. Jowett, always keen to prove the reliability and ruggedness of their vehicles, saw the steep slopes as a perfect test bed for their pride and joy - the seven horsepower machine, more tortoise than hare, which was reckoned capable of climbing anything with the possible exception of the Cow and Calf Rocks.

At a gymkhana at Five Lane Ends a Jowett had scaled a one-in-two slope, just to prove it could. So, as Hepolite Scar attracted more and more can-do types in a boggling variety of machines, Jowetts cut a deep trench just below the summit which was to turn an endurance test into a test of nerve. You can still see it to this day.

Billy Jowett, co-founder of the car firm, and George and Bill Hepworth, founders of Hepworth and Grandage, the engineering firm, were keen rivals in scar contests. But one day Jowett had what he thought was the last laugh - his car beat the much snootier Alvis of the Hepworths, which had to be towed to the top, unable to negotiate the hill under its own steam.

But Hepolite Scar was named after H&G's brand name, so the Hepworths ended up immortalised on the landscape if not on the map.

It wasn't only cars which tackled the zigzag terrors of the scar. Motorcyclists loved the challenge, among them devotees of the Scott, built at Saltaire to a revolutionary design involving a twin-cylinder, water-cooled, two-stroke engine with a distinctive hum which enthusiasts said you could hear as far away as Harden if the wind was blowing the right way.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.