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

      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.