Land could not be minted! Land can only be lived upon, and loved.
Eleanor Catton The Luminaries
It was a dark and stormy night, 23rd
September 1513. Rabbie Crawford had been on the run for two weeks. He was one
of the last survivors of a disastrous battle at Flodden. Rabbie was also a
distant cousin of a defeated Scottish commander who died on the field of battle.
He did not feel like hanging about in Scotland, so he and a few friends turned
tail and ran. And they kept on running, until on the night of 23rd
they came across a river that barred the way south. Soaked by the rain and
pained with hunger they stopped to look for shelter. Turning to their left they
saw a light and advanced on it. Ready to murder anyone who got in their way
they knocked on the door of a single storey barn. A wizened old man opened the
door. He smiled at the desperate Scots and without question welcomed them in.
Rabbie and his mates had discovered Keld and Swaledale’s legendary promise of
hospitality to vagrants, dissidents and the dispossessed.
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| Rabbie Crawford slept here |
This is my imagination of the type of events that certainly happened. British battles have repeatedly been connected with the Swale. What is real is even two hundred years earlier, after the Battle of Bannockburn the victorious Scots raided all over the North Riding of Yorkshire. They arrived in Swaledale in search of plunder. Villagers suffered from their violence.
Yet another northern battle resonated in this
landscape, six miles east of Keld. Culloden, in 1746, resulted in the
capitulation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and once again fugitives from the battle
scattered southwards. Stuart-aligned brothers James and George Birkbeck had
bought land on the Swale next to the Punch Bowl Inn and planted two Scots Pines
as a signal to Stuart followers that friendship would be offered here to those
in need. A descendant of one of those pines still stands today in the
churchyard. The Punch Bowl had been first built in 1638 and operates still
providing habitual warm Swale hospitality.
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| An overcowded landscape |
Many people say of the British landscape today that it is overcrowded. Swaledale offers relief and respite from a clogging of people, buildings and roads. Yet it was not always so. From 8000 BC, when Mesolithic men arrived in the dale, through 1900 BC and the arrival of the Beaker folk and onto 300 BC when Iron Age man resided in the dale the population grew and put down roots. I find it remarkable today looking at the straight-sided slopes to the south of the Swale at Feetham that the stone walls preserve a field system that Iron Age man laboured to construct. Later, in AD 71 the resident Brigantes were defeated by the Romans at nearby Stanwick and civilisation piled in to the dale bringing with it trade and more settlers.
Then came an industrial development of a valued mineral
in the dale that was to define its importance until 1880. Lead. Blocks, or
pigs, of lead have been found which bear the names of Roman emperors such as Domitian,
Trajan, Hadrian and (our family’s favourite of them all) Vespasian. These
governed in the years between 81 and 138 AD. Despite a fall in lead-mining
activity after the Romans left Britain it rose again after the Norman Conquest
with Yorkshire monasteries spotting cannily the wealth that lead could bring
them. The monks prevailed despite much avarice amongst competing families and
bands of opportunists. After Henry VIII’s time and the retreat of the
monasteries’ powers, respectability crept in with wealthy landowning families
from the south of England realising that comparatively cheap land could be
acquired along the Swale. Grand country houses were built, estates were laid
down and the population grew further. The earls of Wharton at one time owned
substantial land along the Swale from around 1650 until 1715.
 |
| Thomas 5th Baron Wharton |
The fifth baron Thomas Earl of Wharton was a
charismatic character who briefly both put his stamp on the landscape in
Ireland and Yorkshire and brought with it his notoriety. Thomas did not live in
Swaledale but the family took much wealth from the lead in it. Thomas was a
Whig politician, a member of the Kit-Cat Club, both a charmer and a ruthless
destroyer of foes, and he lived a life of debauchery. Jonathan Swift wrote of
Wharton: “He seems an ill dissembler and an ill liar. He is Presbyterian in
politics and an atheist in religion”. I would love to have met him.
Of all the lords of the Swaledale Manors, Philip, 4th
Lord Wharton, was probably the most distinguished. He took pride in both his
Swaledale estates and his workers. He developed lead mining, looked after the
welfare of his miners and helped those persecuted for their religious beliefs. The common people of Swaledale at this time were wild, cut
off and ambivalent to civilising influences. The Anglican church showed little
interest in the Swale landscape, and the people soon turned, under Wharton
guidance, to nonconformity.
I recall my first view of Swaledale, westwards up to
Keld, on a warm June afternoon in 1985 midway through a walking coast-to-coast expedition. Following a liquid lunch of
several pints of Theakstons Best Bitter at The King’s Arms in Reeth my walking
companion David and I dropped through the back streets down to the river. My
log written on 25th June reveals inebriation entwined with
romanticism and a sense of the countryside as we felt it.
“Crossing the Swale to the south bank via a
wrought-iron footbridge we glimpsed whirlpools of activity made by fish and
insects. The path then hugged the bank of the river, threading its way through
green pastures mottled with the myriad colours of wild flowers. Centuries old fields
were dotted with stone barns now protected by officialdom against demolition.
We were newly intoxicated, this time by the early summer sun heating young
grasses, flower blossoms and the damp earth. The splendour, isolation and
beauty of Swaledale unfolded before our droopy eyes. We lay down on the green
and went to sleep, the river tinkling at our side.”
In 1985 I tried to learn about the people who had
lived in this landscape in recent years. In 2018 I did the same. I was largely
disappointed. When you question today’s Swaledale’s residents you are likely to
find they have no roots there; they were born far away. I find the experience
of Rory Stewart, MP and author of walking expeditions, similar to my own in
Swaledale: “I have been walking for twenty one days through one of the most
remote, sparsely populated parts of Britain, and I am yet to meet anyone who
has not travelled outside the United Kingdom. Nine out of ten people had
apparently not been born in the village in which they now live.”
Yet the Swale landscape has had its characters, some
eccentrics whose names and lives resonate down the decades. There have been
dramas too. Marie Hartley, a historian of Yorkshire life, wrote: “One Good
Friday in the eighteenth century a father and son were finishing some repair
work at Brandy Bottle mine in Flinter Gill when the archway of the level fell
in and trapped the son. The father had to return for help and met his wife near
Gunnerside. She ran to the mine, entered the level, and knowing nothing of the
way rushed in the dark and past dangerous places to where her son was lying
buried. When rescuers arrived he was found to be dead.
When the mines became unprofitable sheep
farming provided some value but Swaledale farmers often had other practical jobs
such as shoemakers, joiners, gamekeepers, masons and smiths. This harsh landscape was not
noted for raising artists, writers and musicians. Yet there was one farmer who had
a musical ear even if it was of an eccentric type. His name was Neddy Dick. Neddy Dick's actual name was Richard Alderson.
When Neddy was born there were several Richard Aldersons (Alderson being a
common surname hereabouts) and it is possible that Neddy Dick got his nickname
as being Richard (Dick) the son of Edward (Ned) Alderson, to distinguish him
from the other Richard Aldersons.
Neddy was born to Edward and Ann Alderson. They
were farmers near Muker when Neddy was baptised in 1845. Neddy died in 1926 at
Sunnybrow, Reeth, and is buried in Muker churchyard. He seems to have been a
real character, a loner with a passion for music. He became locally famous for
the limestone lithophone he constructed, using stones mainly taken from the
river Swale.
For from common Swaledale stones Neddy fashioned out
the tones
That could hold the dalesfolk bound with their magic music sound,
And the tunes he played were sweet - he had them dancing in the street;
On their faces he put smiles as they travelled many miles to him play.
A fellow villager said of
him: “He wer a
queer un. He wer brought up to farming: but his mind wer always running on
music. He neglected ‘isself badly and though he had the money he did’nt know
how to use it. Lots o’ fowk came to hear him play on t’ stones he has fished up
out o’ t’ beck.” When Neddy died his stones were returned to The Swale.
Closer to the modern day I
heard tell of a previous owner of The Punch Bowl Inn in Birkbeck. He was a
doctor and prior to taking on the inn he had been struck off the medical register.
No one could tell me what he had done but a local said he died in Room 3 and
occasional occupants of this room report his ghost is seen here.
On my latest visit to the Swale the country was
experiencing the wettest winter and spring for over thirty years. The fell
sides were devoid of sheep, the farmers allowing their flocks to find what
grass they could on the common land in the villages including on the verges
outside The Punch Bowl. Lingering margins of snow clung to the lea of the stone
walls that divide the fields. The landscape was eerily quiet when it should
have been alive with the bleating of newly born lambs. We heard the plaintive
cry of black grouse. This is a bird that was only re-introduced in the UK
fifteen years ago and is a symbol of a changing use of the Swale landscape.
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| Commerce on the Swale |
Now that the lead mines and the hushes lie quiet and
redundant and the farmers struggle, tourism and game shooting are the only
activities that will finance the preservation of the dale. (Hushes were
temporary dams built on the top of a valley side. When the land behind was full
of water the dam was deliberately burst. The ensuing torrent removed the rocks
and revealed strata of lead that would be carried down with the debris. The ore
was then collected at the bottom. On encountering the despoliation in the early
1970s, Alfred Wainwright wrote in his Coast to Coast Walk book, “today a bulldozer
would be used”. Forty years on fracking would be used. I bet there was no Kirby
Misperton style protesting halting the practice in the nineteenth century; the
Victorians had no truck with green politics.)
Unlike other Yorkshire dales, Swaledale has never seen
factories and railways. Drove roads laid down in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries crisscross the countryside, now widened a little and metalled. The
modern craze for cycling attracts hearty types from the cities (and even The
Tour de France in 2014); lycra clad pedallers searching for and just passing
through a wilderness that may not exist.
A challenge to the younger generations is to address
the dilemma of how to manage this landscape for future generations. I believe
the novelist Eleanor Catton is right; land should “only be lived upon and
loved”. Visitors like me, the current generation of Aldersons and other older farmers
may wish to keep the landscape largely as it is. But why, if fewer younger folk
value what is there today? When younger folk prefer to live virtually (on their
digital devices) and spend vacation times in foreign parts they show no
appetite for custodianship of a remote, northern English landscape. As I wrote
about Kelling in Norfolk, “what will keep
this topography alive?”
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| What is its future? |
Here is a reading list of books
on mining, The Swale, the Kit-Kat Club members, Yorkshire and pretty well
anything that inspires me about English northern hills, rivers and pubs.
Fiction:
·
The Silver
Pigs; Lindsey Davies. 1989 (Silver mining in Vespasian’s Britain by a supreme
crime novel writer)
·
The
Luminaries; Eleanor Catton. 2013
·
The Colour;
Rose Tremain. 2003
(The latter
two, a recommended brace of novels on gold mining on the south island of New
Zealand)
Non-fiction:
·
Rural
Economy of Yorkshire; Mr. Marshall. 1788
·
Yorkshire
Dales National Park; Arthur Raistrick. 1971
·
The
Yorkshire Dales; Marie Hartley & Joan Ingilby. 1956
·
Yorkshire
North Riding – County Books; Oswald Harling. 1951
·
Yorkshire
Dales and Fells; Gordon Home. 1906
·
The Changing
Dales; W.R. Mitchell. 1988
·
The Complete
Guide to the battlefields of Great Britain; David Smurthwaite. 1984
·
The Kit-Cat
Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation; Ophelia Field. 2008
·
Yorkshire
Oddities Incidents and Strange Events; S. Baring-Gould. 1987
·
A Coast to
Coast Walk; A. Wainwright. 1973
·
The Marches;
Rory Stewart. 2016
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