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.
Field laithe (barn) below Birks Wood (Walk 10)
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 later 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. 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 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.
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. Prior to 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 the 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 the cattle are bred for meat, being sold on for fattening before finally going to the butcher. Traditionally the cattle were set out to graze the riverside meadows in spring before being moved onto the higher pastures. During the 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.