Nidd

Dead Man's Hill from Rain Stang

If the day comes when I wish to commit murder – unlikely but you never know what lies ahead if Trump is re-elected - I have chosen the place where the body will be buried; Rain Stang. This bleak hill tops out at 1486 feet, five miles east from the source of the River Nidd in North Yorkshire. This is wild country, little known and almost inaccessible. The Stang glares northwards to Dead Man’s Hill and Little Whernside. Standing on the summits of these dreary hills I once looked across to the eastern flank of Great Whernside where the Nidd springs from underground. I wrote, in a chapter on Alkelda, that Little Whernside is covered in bogs and marshes and is tiresome to walk.

I was not the first person to contemplate murder in these parts. Another who actually did the foul deed, (in my case I hope I am being hypothetical), was an innkeeper named Maggie Thompson who was suspected, in 1728 along with her son, of murdering three pedlars on the track I had been recently walking. Their corpses were found buried in this very ground. (Now I have held a long affinity with pedlars as, at the age of eight, I played the part of a pedlar in my first stage role. My only words were: “I’m Luke Betterworth. I’m a pedlar, sir”, after I had been discovered sleeping in a cupboard.)

Where Maggie hid her victims is that same Dead Man’s Hill.  Harry Speight, in his book on Nidderdale published in 1906, confirms that the accursed hill 

received its present appellation from the horrible circumstance of three human (headless) bodies having been discovered here in 1728 buried in the peat. They were supposed to be the remains of three Scotch pedlars, who, after disposing of their goods, came to a foul end while traversing the lonely road out of Nidderdale into Coverdale. Yet some say they were murdered at one of the lonely farms in the dale, and that their heads were severed from the bodies to prevent identification.

Though the circumstances of the murder are but a lingering tradition in the dale, the fact that the findings of the murdered men ‘without their heads’ is duly recorded in the old township books of Middlesmoor, under date May 30th 1728. The following are the hitherto unprinted particulars:

May 30th, 1728. Three murder’d Bodies were found burrd. on Lodge Edge without heads.

Expenses at the time to the Coroner     £0.  13s.   4d.                                                For sending the warrants into Coverdale     £0.    0s.   8d.                                                For carrying the Biers                £0.    0s.   6d.                                              To Sexton for making the graves     £0.    1s.   6d.                                                To Antho. Hanley for conveying the murder’d bodies away when found £0.    1s.   0d.

When the crime was committed was never discovered, nor were the perpetrators ever found.

Middlesmoor is the highest village in the Yorkshire Dales. On my latest visit I went in to the church of St. Chad and it’s churchyard in which the “murder’d bodies” may well lie. The building is perched majestically on a steep hill looking over Upper Nidderdale. The remoteness and tranquility of this place enriches me on every visit but in this time of pandemic, lock-in and lack of foreign travel, it is the best I can get and I gulp it down like a drug. Alkelda may well have visited here too. So may have young Richard Plantagenet, as Middleham lies only nine miles to the northeast. The Archbishop of York consecrated a chapel in Middlesmoor in 1484 when Richard was king. Like remote corners of the North York Moors, the villagers near the Nidd were mostly Roman Catholic. An early seventeenth century Anglican cleric moaned that in his services he preached “sometimes to two persones, sometimes to three or fower...” He should be so lucky! Hereabouts in Lower Wharfedale today there are villages that don’t even open their church on some Sundays.

Two hundred years before Alkelda was in this area Anglo Saxons established a religious building in Middlesmoor. A cross from that time resides at the rear of the current church. It was in contemplation of these early inhabitants that I stepped out of the church, up the hill – passing one of my favourite upland pubs called The Crown Hotel - where the landlord is so grumpy he has a sign on the door that reads ‘Miserabilly’s Grotto’ - past the closely set stone-built cottages, through a couple of ginnels and then I had a surprise. Two large developments of stone clad apartment blocks were being constructed. In the mid-1800s around 130 people lived in the village. This shrank to 40 within the last ten years. So why are more houses being built? I was to discover the answer when I descended to the banks of the Nidd.

But first I climbed up Moor Lane, through wind and rain and into the cloud, towards the appropriately named Rain Stang. Great Whernside lay ominously dark and foreboding to the west. Dead Man’s Hill stared from across the valley at me through a swirling curtain of mist. Both summits were invisible through the cloud. There are no trees up here, just grouse butts, heather and marram grass. I heard the occasional red grouse with its ‘go-back, back, back’ call but no other birds, I wondered why. I tramped on down towards Scar Cross Reservoir.

It was at this point that it dawned on me why Nidderdale is not my favourite Yorkshire Dale. I think this partly because of the urbanisation of the lower dale. However, if an example is required of where man has taken a landscape and manipulated it to satisfy his needs then this is it. Scar Cross is the second in a chain of manmade lakes that lie in the natural path of the River Nidd. In 1921 the Lord Mayor of Bradford, (an industrial city to which I referred in my chapter on Kettlewell which is a mere seven miles away but seeming in another world), was impressively named Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Gadie, T.D., J.P. He was also chairman of the city council’s water committee which long held a strategic plan to build a reservoir up here in Upper Nidderdale. They knew then, what I know now, that it rains a lot here and Gadie and his men  - I can vouchsafe there were no women councillors on the Bradford City Council at that time – intended to get their baths filled with it.

'Gadie's Folly'

It must be said that the construction of ‘Gadie’s Folly’, as the scheme’s detractors knew it, was not only a hazardous and bold plan but also it turned out to be a triumphant success. It was achieved at the cost of £2 million. A temporary settlement, Scar Village, built during the 1920s housed over a thousand people – engineers, builders, stonemasons, tunnelers as well as their wives and children whose schoolteachers also lived there. And where you find men engaged in hard physical labour, in a remote location far away from the urban drinking dens and fleshpots, you will also find a few women eager to relieve the men of their hard earned pay through pleasures of the flesh. One such woman was Girtie who came, many years later, into the caring hands of my wife who tended her through her dying days in a nursing home. Girtie recounted colourful tales of life in Scar House. She liked to boast that “the young ‘uns today think they invented sex but I can tell you, we…..”

Fifteen years after Gadie cut the first sod at Scar House he laid the last stone on the upper wall of the dam on 7th September 1936. By now knighted for his metropolitan achievements, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Anthony Gadie proudly brought some good citizens of Bradford – attired in woollen suits, the women wearing their best hats, the men all under trilbies or bowlers – and they partied to celebrate a momentous occasion. Today this reservoir supplies Bradford with 100 million of litres a day. Even before it was finished it prevented water rationing during the droughts of 1933 and 1934 as it did again in the droughts of the 1990s.

On my latest visit I crossed the dam wall in pouring rain, yet stopped to read the words on the plaque mounted on Gadie’s final stone and peer over the edge at the seventy-foot drop to watch the Nidd reappear rather meekly and pathetically below. As I started off down the dale I felt sorry for this river, because all its gathering power and width three miles upstream had been taken from it. It is now just a trickle again, and remains so until it collects the run off from the moors to east and west. There was still no tuneful birdsong. Then I entered the fields at the top of the dale, home to Swaledale flocks, a few cattle and hundreds of pheasants. Now I had birdsong but only the monotonous crowing and clucking of this dim-witted game bird, a victim of some of mankind’s playtime. Before the river turns southwards at Bracken Ridge I walked past another, twenty first century symbol of man’s imprimatur on rural landscape. At New Houses, now renamed Home Farm, there have been built enormous ‘cow ‘usses’ (in Yorkshire speak), or cow sheds, with slatted wooden walls to allow air in and the smell out. The modern trend to maintain herds inside is a worrying thought when I like to believe my milk, cream and yoghurt comes from cows grazing green pastures for three quarters of the year. Another feature of this landscape is the redundant outlying barns that have been converted into dwellings with neat new window frames in Farrow and Ball shades of green and set in neatly tended lawns. But, they are empty of people. I was soon to find out why.

21st century cow 'uss

My curiosity about this managed and changing landscape drove me, at Limley Farm, to stop and talk to the shepherd James, who, with his dog was bringing a flock of sheep off the moorside into some pens in the yard. I stopped to admire his work and ask him about the new cow ‘usses up river. Happy to stop for a chat he explained that they and the land up above us belonged to a 1,500 hundred acres estate bought four years ago by a businessman from South Yorkshire. This man and his wife have set about restoring the land to the condition it was in many years ago. It is said that overgrazing by large flocks of sheep had caused the wildlife to diminish and the woods to die. This couple have renovated the outlying barns and converted some into luxurious accommodation for visiting ‘guns’ from the south. Only occupied for a few weeks of the year they provide income for an estate that will not survive from just the husbandry of sheep and cattle. The needs of the shooting business probably explain those new apartments in Middlesmoor. They’ll certainly not house local workers.

From a distance the moors up here give the appearance of being natural but they are anything but. They are carefully managed. In area such as these in upland Britain one of the ways by which landowners can draw income is to establish or maintain game shooting of grouse over the moors with pheasant and partridge shooting in lower areas. Hides for the guns are built of stone and project starkly above the treeless moors. Heather can be renewed with controlled burning as red grouse will thrive if the heather on which it feeds produces young shoots as well as flowers and seeds. Yet there are some in government who want to stop heather burning as they believe it destroys other wildlife and pollutes the air. Estates that house regular shoots attract customers from all over Europe but especially the Home Counties around London. Shepherd James and Limley’s farmer both complained of the “noisy, disrespectful visitors who are ignorant of the country way of life”.

I was reminded of the scrap metal dealer who bought the Kelling estate. Without his new money the farming heritage and timeless landscape of north Norfolk would have been left to decay. As with Kelling now with the upper reaches of the Nidd – as well as many other ancient landscapes of Yorkshires dales and moors. Traditional farming that enriched cities like Bradford and Leeds no longer pays. Farmers who made a good living in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries have dwindled. James is a comparative rarity in that he was born near Middlesmoor and has spent his whole life farming within a stone’s throw of his birthplace.

Whilst I may be uneasy about cattle being confined inside sheds throughout the year I feel thankful that a scrap metal dealer in Norfolk, an electrical contractor in Nidderdale – as well as an internet pioneer in the North York Moors and other entrepreneurs -  are not only working the landscapes (that have been worked for two thousand years) but are assisting the return of vanished species of wildlife. They provide employment for local people who have families and who send their children to local schools, all of which sustains a local economy. This economy would die - with the consequential loss of communities as well as solid English values and heritage - without their financial investment in a rural way of life. 

I have written about landscapes around the world that have faced the terrible impact of nature be it fire, flood or humankind’s warfare. So in a fashion, is this pastoral idyll in North Yorkshire under attack? In November 2009 overflowing rivers caused unimaginable damage to farming communities in Yorkshire and the Lake District. In 2018 the ‘Beast from the East’ brought a revival for Lochmaea suturalis, more prosaically called a Heather beetle. This little grub feeds on heather and its numbers were boosted by the cold weather. These pesky creatures are eating their way across the heather moorland turning it from its distinctive purple to a bronze colour and leaving little nourishment for the grouse. A consequence is the number of grouse is falling, reducing the appeal of Yorkshire’s moors for shooting game. In August 2019 came unexpected floods in Swaledale resulting in sheep and cattle being swept down the dale. Cottagers and small business folk in Reeth would have thought they lived high enough above the river to escape flooding. They were wrong. I have no doubt that flood and beetle are bad for business.

Before I left the Nidd I took one last glance back up the dale and then the sun came out. The golds, reds, yellows and greens of autumn hung on the trees with a backcloth of deep blue sky streaked with white and black clouds. Across the canvas of colours tracked the grey tarmac road and as I looked I spotted a convoy of black Range Rovers driving slowly up the dale. It seemed to me they were like a funeral cortege only this was before the slaughter of hundreds of pheasants and partridges. Yes, mankind certainly knows how to mould the landscape to his will.

For years the upper reaches of the Nidd have withstood the encroachment of builders of reservoirs, cow ‘usses, apartments as well as shooting parties. On the moor tops there is still a remote wilderness that collects our water and sends it rushing down to the river. In Lofhouse village the thankful inhabitants who survived the First World War and Spanish flu remodelled their ancient water drinking fountain as a war memorial in 1920. Its inscription contains worthy Edwardian good sense. One hundred years later the simple homily can equally be attributed to the warding off of another pandemic:

If you want to be healthy, wealthy and stout                                                                                                        use plenty of cold water inside and out                                                                                                            let animal and man drink freely.                                                                                                                    a pint of cold water three times a day                                                                                                               is the surest way to keep doctor away.                                                                                                                Whoso thirsteth let him come hither and drink.