Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: North and East. Dennis Kelsall

nevertheless displayed in the carvings of dates and initials on lintels above doorways.

      From the ruin of the Quaker Meeting House to the burial ground at East Scale (Walk 9)

      Grouped in compact villages, often overlooking a green, or spread as individual farms along the valley, they are one of the endearing features of the Dales countryside. Long and narrow, the farmhouses often included an attached barn – or laithe – for the animals, and in some areas, notably Swaledale and Wensleydale, isolated barns were built in the valley fields to store summer hay and house livestock over winter.

Industry and enterprise

      The relative inaccessibility of the region protected it from the burgeoning development of the Industrial Revolution, for, even though it held abundant raw materials in stone, coal and metal ore, the difficulties of transportation often rendered large-scale growth uneconomic. Yet, despite its comparatively small scale, mining and quarrying did become important local money-making activities, sometimes worked on a part-time basis to supplement income from farming. The abandoned ruins of pit-head buildings, smelters and disused quarries are to be found scattered throughout the region, often in the most inhospitable of places.

      Veins of lead ore occur in the limestone throughout the eastern and northern parts of the Dales, and have been mined sporadically since the arrival of the Romans. Following the Industrial Revolution, the industry peaked during the middle 18th and early 19th centuries, but then fell into decline because of high transport costs, competition from foreign imports, and the simple fact that many seams had been worked to their economic limit. Nevertheless, over the centuries huge amounts were produced, and it has been estimated that over half a million tonnes of metallic lead have been excavated from Swaledale alone, with more than half of this coming solely from the Old Gang mines above Surrender Bridge.

      Where there is lead, there is often silver too, albeit it small amounts, and the Duke of Devonshire’s Cupola Mine above Grassington produced a significant amount of silver as a by-product before it closed in 1885. In the area further west, around Malham, copper and zinc ores were also discovered, and more recently deposits of baryte and fluorspar have been worked in the Dales.

      Old Gang mill (Walk 18)

      Such enterprise brought with it a dramatic increase in population, attracting miners and ordinary labourers from across the country. Some came on their own, but others brought their families too, expanding the tiny villages. In Muker, for example, the new part of the village by the main lane is quite distinct from the old heart, and in many villages you will find chapels, village halls and reading rooms that all resulted from this boom. Inevitably, as the lead industry declined, the population drifted away, some heading northeast to continue their trade in the coal mines, while others went to try their hand in the textile valleys of Lancashire and west Yorkshire.

      To the north and on the high ground, the Yoredale rocks contain thin seams of coal of varying quality. These were intermittently mined from the beginning of the 14th century until the railway age, often from small workings called bell pits. The coal supplied domestic needs as well as being used on a larger scale to fire smelt furnaces and lime kilns. On the bleak top of Fountains Fell, coal was even processed in an oven to produce coke, a trouble worth taking to reduce the weight of the product to be carried down the hill. Another important source of fuel both for the home and the mines was peat, cut from turbaries (places where turf or peat is dug) on the upland bogs.

      All these activities have long since finished, but not so the extensive stone quarries around Horton in Ribblesdale and at Linton, which serve the chemical industry and provide aggregate for building, roads and railways. Sadly, these massive workings are a scar on the landscape, a far cry from the earlier, small-scale operations that produced stone for local building and walling, and to produce lime fertiliser. At first glance, these old, abandoned workings are now barely distinguishable from their natural backdrop, something their modern-day equivalents might find harder to achieve once they have been worked out.

      Any other enterprise that developed was only ever on a limited scale. Fast-flowing streams in the main valleys powered grist and, later, other mills, with textiles becoming significant in some corners, such as Grassington and Aysgarth. Just as important was the widespread cottage textile industry, carried out in individual farms and cottages, not least to the northwest, where gloves and stockings fell off clattering needles, wielded by woman, child and man alike, in such prodigious quantities that these people become known as ‘the terrible knitters of Dent’.

      The major inhibiting factor for industry was a lack of suitable transport to main industrial centres. Turnpikes through the Dales were few, and the canal age touched only the southern portals at Gargrave and Skipton. The engineering determination of the Victorians served them better, as the entrepreneurial spirit pushed the railways deep into the heart of the region, along Wensleydale and into Wharfedale.

      Ambitious plans conceived for links into the lesser valleys never came to fruition, although a crowning achievement was realised in 1876 in the Settle–Carlisle line. It was forced through by the Midland Railway at great financial and human cost, ironically not to serve the Dales but to compete with existing mainline routes to Scotland. For a while, the railway sustained trade along the western fringes and into Wensleydale, enabling rapid transportation of dairy products to satisfy the markets of industrial towns. But the boom was short-lived, and now only a mineral railway track and the famous Settle–Carlisle line remain, and the latter’s future was only secured in 1989, at the end of a long and hard-fought battle after it was threatened with closure in the 1980s.

      But, while railways and main roads are few, innumerable paths and tracks criss-cross the whole area. Some may have their origins in prehistoric times, others, like the Cam High Road above Bainbridge, follow the lines of Roman roads, while many more were trodden by the monks and lay workers of the great medieval abbeys and priories as they administered their far-flung estates.

      Dating from pre-industrial Britain, pack-horse trails and cattle drove roads were once the main arteries of trade, while other tracks connected small settlements to market towns. Some of the tracks that appear on today’s maps now appear rather pointless, ending abruptly on the slope of a bare hillside or winding onto the moors to finish in a barren wilderness. But follow them on the ground and you will come across abandoned turbaries or disused mine and quarry workings. Other tracks, called coffin roads, served a more sombre purpose. Even if a chapel existed in an upper valley, burial rights were generally reserved to the parish churches down below, and so the dead had to be brought down for interment, as was the case in Swaledale. Indeed, there are hardly any routes you can follow in the Dales that do not have some story to tell.

      The miners’ bridge across Old Gang Beck (Walk 18)

Farming in the Dales

      The beauty of the Dales landscape is the product of its history, and it is one of those few places where human influence can be said to have improved upon nature, albeit unintentionally. Even the ravages left by historic mining and quarrying have faded, and the grassed-over spoil heaps, collapsed hollows and moss-grown ruined buildings have now assumed an almost natural quality.

      Working life in the Dales seems to have evolved largely in accord with its environment, to create a balance that could be sustained through the passing seasons and from year to year. For example, primeval forest was originally cleared for crops and grazing, but some woodland was always retained to provide fuel and timber. And although the bare upland fells eventually returned to little more than rough grazing, they freed lower land for arable farming and the production of hay.

      By and large, the farming here has always been relatively unintensive, working within the limits of the generally poor-quality land and traditional boundaries. Getting on for 5500 miles (8851km) of stone walls divide the valleys into a mosaic of small fields, and fan out up the steep hillsides to define far-reaching territories that