made their money from wool as well as growing a range of staple crops. The monasteries also exploited the mineral resources of the region, mining for coal, lead and other metals.
After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century, ownership of much of the land eventually fell to individual freeholding farmers, and by the 17th century a climate of growing personal prosperity brought a new confidence that was translated into building in stone. It is from this era that the earliest domestic buildings survive, sturdily constructed from rough stone, with dressed blocks being reserved for corners, lintels and window openings. They reflect the local geology, in limestone, gritstone and heavy roofs of stone flags. Although largely utilitarian and without ornate decoration, individualism is expressed in the carvings of dates and initials added to the lintels above doorways. 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 half of the Dales and have been mined sporadically since the arrival of the Romans. The industry peaked during the middle 18th and early 19th centuries, but then fell into decline because of high transport costs and competition from foreign imports. Where there is lead, there is often silver too, 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.
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, walling and to produce lime fertiliser. At first glance, these old abandoned workings are now hardly distinguishable from the natural backdrop, something their modern-day equivalents might find harder to achieve once they have been worked out.
What other enterprise 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 in the north west where gloves and stockings fell off clattering needles wielded by woman, child and man alike in such prodigious quantities that they become known as ‘terrible knitters of Dent’.
18th-century lime kiln at Braida Garth (Walk 43)
The major inhibiting factor to industry was a lack of suitable transport to the 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 their 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 that won only in 1989 at the end of a long and hard-fought battle after it too was threatened with closure in the 1980s.
The Ribblehead Viaduct from Ivescar (Walk 38)
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 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, the pack-horse trails and cattle drove roads were once the main arteries of trade, while others connected small settlements to the market towns around the periphery. Some of the tracks appearing 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 routes, 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. Indeed there are hardly any routes you can follow in the Dales that do not have some story to tell.
Farming in the Dales
The beauty of the Dales landscape is the culmination 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 naturally to have evolved to run 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 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 5,500 miles (8,851km) 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.
