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 meet along the watersheds on the high moorlands above. The walls are everywhere, except around Dentdale, where hedges prevail, and on the Howgills, where boundaries are few.
Although some walls only date back a couple of hundred years to the Enclosure Acts, a few are truly ancient, and hark back to the time of the first tentative farmers. Together with the tidy villages, compact farmsteads, isolated field barns and sporadic lime kilns, they create a built environment that has a visual harmony completely at one with its setting.
But nothing remains static, not even in a farming landscape, and change is inevitable to meet ever-evolving demands. Arable farming disappeared with the arrival of the railways in the latter part of the 19th century, when fresh food could easily be ‘imported’ from the more productive market garden areas of the country. Dairy farming, beef-cattle and sheep rearing are now the main activities, cattle predominant on the lower farms, with sheep ubiquitous elsewhere.
Out to check the sheep on Grisedale Common (Walk 9)
Indeed, so much do they reflect the character of life in the Dales that the Swaledale sheep has been adopted as the emblem of the national park. It is only such hardy breeds, with thick, dense fleeces, that are able to survive the harsh conditions and poor grazing of the upper fells, and they are generally only brought down for lambing and shearing, or when deep winter snow blankets the sparse vegetation upon which they otherwise manage to survive.
Although wool was once an important element of the local economy, that of the hill sheep is now used only for carpet manufacture, and low prices often mean that its value is less than the cost of shearing. The lambs are generally sold on to lowland farms for fattening, with the strong ewes being valued as breeding stock. On the moors, the sheep are ‘heafed’ or ‘hefted’ to the land, an instinct that keeps them within their own territory. The ewes somehow pass this instinct on to their lambs, which makes the job of the farmer immeasurably easier when it comes to rounding up the flock.
The number of sheep is determined by what the grazing can sustain. Too small and the land will become overrun with scrub, but too much will kill off the heather and denude the grass slopes. Maintaining that delicate balance over the centuries has created the open aspect of the countryside that we so value today.
Amongst the cottongrass on the slopes of Dodd Fell Hill (Walk 35)
Long before Wallace and his indefatigable companion, Grommit, revealed their attachment to Wensleydale cheese, dairy farming in the lower dales had been an important element in the local economy. Before the arrival of the railway, milk itself could only be used to supply local demand, but the coming of the railway meant that cheese and butter made on farms could be ‘exported’ for sale in distant towns, even as far away as London. Cheese is still produced in a small factory at Hawes, and although the milk trains no longer run, road tankers make the daily round of farms to supply the bottling and processing plants.
Higher up the valley, the pastures are not as rich, and cattle are bred for meat, being sold on for fattening before finally going to the butcher. Traditionally cattle were sent out to graze riverside meadows in spring before being moved onto higher pastures. During summer, the meadows were left to produce hay, the herd being brought back after the harvest to graze the late growth. Individual field barns – or laithes – removed the need to cart the hay, and meant that cattle could over-winter in the fields rather than be brought back to the farm.
Managing the meadows in this way allowed them to develop a rich herbage of spring and summer flowers, which in turn encouraged a diversity of both insects and birds. In some areas, particularly Swaledale, they are still a delight to behold, but such practices do not sit well alongside pressures to improve productivity. Reseeding and the use of fertilisers and herbicides might double the yield of grass, but the wild flowers that once grew there all but disappear within a season. Many farmers are trying to redress the balance between efficiency and environmental conservation, but the overriding concern must still be a need to earn an income.
PLANTS AND WILDLIFE
Despite human influences, the environment of the Dales supports a great diversity of habitats, whose individual characteristics are broadly governed by altitude and underlying geology.
Much of the upland is underlain by grits and other impervious rocks, and covered by wet blanket bog, where grass, sphagnum and purple moor grass pervade, with heather, bilberry and heath rush dominating where the ground is drier. Many of the better-drained upland heaths are actively managed as grouse moors, where the old growth of heather is periodically burnt off to
