Kettlewell

Some boffins in London want us to cut our consumption of meat and dairy products by a fifth. They did not consult me before coming up with this arbitrary number that you and I are to follow. They picked this number, without providing an explanation, if I wish to contribute to climate change reduction at the start of this third decade of the century. I doubt they consulted the farmers in Kettlewell and other small farm owners in villages of the Yorkshire Dales. I shall give them the benefit of the doubt over consulting with a few farmers in Lakeland. However, the bright sparks from English Nature and the Committee for Climate Change (CCC) had already made their minds up before stepping out from the M25; they want fewer sheep on northern England’s hills and fewer cows in the valleys. They are like that, these ‘suits’, they don’t listen to what farmers – with centuries of knowledge accumulated by families managing the land productively – tell them. These Westminster bureaucrats know only what they want to know, gleaned from pictures and United Nations scientific journals.

Kettlewell is, statistically, a remote village in Upper Wharfedale six miles from Grassington with a population of 340 in 2015 and thirty pupils in the school. There are plenty of similar villages on the uplands of England. What is remarkable about Kettlewell is its exquisiteness and tranquillity. It nestles “in the shelter of majestic sweeps of mountain limestone clothed with the sweetest herbage.”^ There is neither railway nor motorway, just a single-track road meandering up the dale. This isolated gem of habitation boasts a rich cultural heritage interwoven with the lives of colourful characters that made their marks upon this landscape over two thousand years.

My first enrichment of the local history was in 1974. I was on a stag weekend. The focal point for our carousing was The King’s Head Inn, one of three public houses in the village. A dozen of Nottingham’s finest yeomen required a full weekend of hard drinking to see off the bachelorhood of G.J.B. Minor skirmishes included the rugby tackling of ‘the stag’ on a tarmac road (with resultant black eye and grazed cheek) and a magnificent tumble from a tabletop in the pub by one joyously inebriated fellow who was leading the singing with pint in hand. Had we been more attentive to the local history we might (but on reflection, probably not) have born in mind ‘Awd Platt’, the village smith in the mid 1800s who, like our own G.J.B., was “a man of great sincerity and force of character…full of life’s energy”. John Platt was also a temperance advocate, unlike G.J.B., and many a man attributed his better state in life to John’s advice that ran: “there’s no harm in a’nod glass if a chap wod nubbut stop theear”.

The next time that Kettlewell connected to my world was a few years later when I first met ‘Whale’. Readers of my chapter on Crantock will remember the Beasts of the Jungle (undergraduates of Cambridge University) visiting a house called Kareena. Whale was one such beast. That first encounter is memorable. Lunching at my in-laws (the Dog and Doggess) one day I was told there was another visitor. “Who is it?”, I asked my wife. “Whale”, she replied. Shortly after there was the deep, throaty sound of a motorbike in the driveway. We went outside. The largest BMW bike I have ever seen was being leaned on the wall by a tall man clad from head to toe in black leather. He pealed his helmet off. I was introduced to a seventy-year old six foot six giant, without a hair on his head, grinning from ear to ear. This was Whale, one of the Kareena visitors, who’s real name was Graham Watson.

Now Graham was a Yorkshireman. He was one of four generations to manage Lister’s Mill in Bradford, once the largest silk factory in the world. Graham was a bachelor and so, without a wife and family to drain his pockets, he invested in farmland around Kettlewell and further north in Upper Wharfedale.

Let me take readers back to 1066. Land had been ploughed at Kettlewell for some time by then. There was a carucate (approximately 170 acres) being farmed by the Normans holding the estate in this, the year they and William I won the battle of Hastings. Over the following two hundred years agricultural progress was made hereabouts and by the time of Edward I Kettlewell was a thriving village with eight carucates providing employment and food. A local culture was being embedded in the landscape by hardworking Yorkshiremen, laying down a rewarding way of life for generations that followed. Wise yet entrepreneurial farmers passed on to their sons and daughters knowledge of the land and the woods as well of the habits of the River Wharfe. (Let us remember this when I consider the village’s future, this day I write when Britain leaves the European Union and we ‘gain our independence’.)

Of the eight carucates mentioned above two were held by Elias de Knolles, three by the Abbot of Coverham and the remainder by the Arches and Percy families - all famous names over centuries in northern England. The years to the end of the Tudor period in England featured Kettlewell land being gifted or traded in exchange for favours, forfeits and debts. Land, along with sheep, was a valuable commodity upon which family dynasties floundered or thrived. The housing stock in the village grew slowly. Cottages for the farm workers and the lead mine workers (from 1658 onwards), as in neighbouring Swaledale, were small and cramped. Yet the village thrived amidst a landscape providing rich rewards for the folk that worked hard. By the height of the wool trade wealthy merchants, spinners, weavers and dyers from the nearby cities of Bradford and Halifax were acquiring houses around the village. With them they brought more prosperity and so more employment. Such a person was Clement Holdsworth who bought Scargill House, a Kettlewell farmhouse, in 1900.

My second visit to Kettlewell was in June 1989 whilst walking the Dales Way with wife and son. The route brought us past Scargill House, (of which I knew nothing then other than it was once part of a notable estate), around the maypole, and uphill past The Green to lunch at The King’s Head Inn. I remember now there was not a soul on the street, not a car or a tractor in motion. As we walked up the street, today still rimmed with ancient cottages - some with visible foundations built in the twelfth century - there came a familiar voice from a garden. We observed a house painter up a ladder with his transistor radio on. England was playing Australia at Leeds in an Ashes Test match and John Arlott’s rich voice was reaching out to us clearly  from the radio. How quaint. How quintessentially English. We had to match the mood by downing a pint of two of Yorkshire ale. What could surpass this combination of English delights? (It was slightly undermined by the news that England was being walloped by Australia.)

Like Graham Watson, Clement Holdsworth was a member of a successful West Riding family dynasty. John Holdsworth & Company of Halifax has made worsted for six generations. Like Watson, he loved Wharfedale and acquired Scargill House with surrounding land that he developed into both a family home and an agricultural estate. His son George continued the family business and it is his three sons who are featured in the stunning and emotive stained glass windows in St. Mary’s church in the village. I remember reading about the death of two of these boys in the Second World War and I was touched and saddened; John, serving with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, died in Belgium in 1945; 

Michael was in the Fleet Air Arm and was posted missing on 24^th February 1945; Michael’s twin brother Bill completed the family’s service to all three of Britain’s armed forces and survived the war as a Flight Lieutenant.

A small English village, like many others throughout Britain, had lost two young men who would never add their contribution to both an important, valued business and to a village that needed their touch. Villages and businesses in mid twentieth century Britain were left severely depleted by the war of men with talent. Yet Kettlewell was typical of rural villages and agricultural landscapes; women – many like the Doggess had served in the land army - came to the fore with ideas and vision. They too made their marks upon this land. Bill Holdsworth died young in 1969 yet his widow, Dina, took a significant working interest in John Holdsworth & Company. Women in the village came into ownership of the farms, the small businesses and even the cricket field and pavilion.

On my latest visit to the village I met the modern day human metal of Kettlewell at the weekly Tuesday coffee morning. Twelve women – some lifelong residents, some ‘incomers’ from as far afield as South Africa – greeted me and welcomed me to sit with them and talk about what makes Kettlewell the village it is today; what the threats are; and understanding the challenges on the culture being continued. Josephine farmed in the village with her husband, and she remembers Graham Watson well. “He walked into the bunk barn on our farm one day, never stopped to ask. He was in his shorts! He said he wanted a look round, which he did; said he owned the land next door. Then he walked off!”

“There used to be seven farms in the village,” said her friend Maureen. “Now there are only two. There is only one milk farm near here, up at the (Kilnsey) crag.”

Josephine added: “In my time the next generation did not want to farm. There’s no money in it. They want to go and live in the cities.” This is a common cry I have heard in small villages up and down the country.

I asked about what they thought of the boffins in London, wanting to change the use of much upland in northern England, reduce the number of sheep and cattle. Josephine has a clear memory and strong views of a visit one time. “Experts came here once. Went up on the moor where every villager exercises his and her right to put a single sheep out to graze, have been since the 1700s. They said the moor needed draining to allow tree planting.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well they put drains in. Of course, the moor dried up, no use to anyone; there was no proper grazing for the sheep. We told them it was the wrong thing to do but they didn’t listen. You can’t grow things on the land here. Just good for livestock.”

My talks with the locals – the latest in a long line of farmers who know this land, know how to get the best use from it, how to earn a living, how to keep it for future farmers – proved yet again that so called ‘experts’ from Westminster have little idea how communities such as this have been the backbone of English agricultural wealth creation for centuries. Further, prosperous industrialists such as Clement Holdsworth and William and Graham Watson improved the estates and houses. (Scargill House has been owned by religious movements since 1959 and continues the valuable practice of offering local employment.)

I have also discovered the real story of the renowned Kettlewell Scarecrow Festival. In 1994 a visionary local woman named Jenny Howarth came up with a suggestion for raising funds for the local school. Jenny’s mother had seen a scarecrow display in northern France and the idea came for a one-off, one-day festival – where inhabitants make and display a scarecrow outside their houses - in Kettlewell. Twenty six years later the now annual event takes place over nine days – much to the annoyance of some locals as, although it raises money now for the school, church and village hall, it attracts tourists in cars which clog the narrow streets and disturb the normal village tranquillity.

“People should cut their meat and diary (sic) consumption by a fifth to help save the planet, the Government’s environment committe (sic) has said”. So read the BBC website on 23^rd January 2020. (Maybe the BBC should lose the licence fee, cut its programming costs and send their journalists on a basic spelling course with the proceeds.) Bizarrely, and in an impossibly coincidental use of numbers by another pillar of the British establishment, Waitrose supermarkets, a poll taken by them shows, “a fifth of people are now flexitarians – trying to eat more plant based meals without ditching meat altogether”.

I am suspicious about the wanton use of this number ‘fifths’. Like the current, mendacious President of the USA, these organizations use only numbers that suit them, ignoring the numbers that tell a different story. (Trump fails to tell us that under his administration his people have wracked up a national debt of $1.9 trillion.) Whilst telling us to eat less meat and dairy food the CCC should also tell us the numbers involved in Waitrose’s ‘carbon footprint’ with their import of the many tons of fresh food: sweet corn from India; peppers, celery, cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach and squash from Spain; cherries from Chile; asparagus from Peru; grapes and limes from Brazil; dates from Israel; raspberries from South Africa; bananas from St. Lucia; radishes from Senegal; and  strawberries and onions from Egypt. Much of this produce could be grown in Britain, thereby reducing our reliance on imported food that is flown in. I shall continue to eat meat, cheese, yoghurt, parsnips, beetroots, potatoes, mushrooms, cabbages and pears because I like them and they are good for me. They are also all produced in Britain. If the government is going to be dictatorial about Brits consuming less meat and dairy then they should ‘persuade’ them off eating South African raspberries in winter. Is it worth poisoning the planet for the sake of eating strawberries in January? The time to eat soft fruit, ‘home-grown’, in Britain is the summer.

An enduring life for the villagers and landscape of Kettlewell will be assured if we support its traditional position in the local and national economy, inclusive in an independent Britain (once again). If the commercial price of its produce is too high for some supermarket shoppers then subsidies paid by all the people of Britain will allow the upland farms and farmers of England to thrive. With a reduction in food imports the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions will reduce*. Kettlewell and Upper Wharfedale will return to be both a prosperous farming landscape and continue as a haven for walkers, scarecrows and nature lovers.

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*In a letter to The Times of London on 25^th January 2020, the policy director of the Sustainable Food Trust writes “taking large areas of [UK] land out of food production and covering them with mostly coniferous plantations (the only economically feasible option) would destroy precious ecosystems…” And, “the recommendation to use additives in cattle feed to reduce methane emissions is impractical, since most beef cattle in the UK graze on grass and receive no other feed for much of the year. It is also unnecessary. Research shows that the short-lived nature of methane in the atmosphere means that emissions of cattle and sheep are not adding to global warming contrary to popular belief.” So Josephine is correct. Furthermore, grassy fields, hillsides and mountains capture carbon and pull it down into the soil.

Books:

^ For a delightful yet scholarly read about the whole of Upper Wharfedale I would recommend a book by Harry Speight titled: Upper Wharfedale; being a complete account of the history, antiquities and scenery of the picturesque valley of the Wharfe, from Otley to Langstrothdale. First published in London in 1900 by Elliot Stock it was re-published by Smith Settle of Otley in 1988.

I recommend visitors in Kettlewell to visit Simon Johnstone (from Chesterfield) who owns and runs the village store, built in 1877, where he will sell you a terrific little book: A Walk around Kettlewell; a walk back in time with pictures, history and tales of the village by Colin Hare (from the Isle of Skye, resident of Kettlewell for over 23 years.) Then sit and enjoy a pint in each of The King’s Head Inn, The Bluebell and The Race Horses Hotel.