A NEW book offers an alphabetical armchair adventure through the Yorkshire Dales, taking in cafes, creameries and lots of caves, while looking at the geology of the landscape, the beauty of the flora and fauna and at the stories, both folklore and historical, of the people who live there.
To give you a taste of this book of 26 letters, we’ll delve in at random and draw out six:
C is for Coverdale ghost stories
DEADMAN’S HILL is so called because here, in 1728, three headless bodies of Scottish pedlars were discovered, and then there is Courting Wall Corner which is haunted by a ghostly figure of a woman in a long black cloak who shakes her head in dismay at any who catch her eye.
Courting Wall Corner used to be where lovers met, but this young lady had two lovers. She was forced to make a choice and her plan then was to elope with her true love from Courting Wall Corner to avoid the scandal that would inevitably break.
But her jilted lover discovered her plan and was waiting for her on the corner, where he murdered her and buried her body on the moor nearby.
Some time later, peat cutters discovered a female skeleton wrapped in the remains of her black cloak.
A-Z of the Yorkshire Dales: Places, People, History, by Mike Appleton (Amberley, £15.99)
D is for the Dancing Flags of Dent
IN Flintergill, near Dent on the Cumbrian side of the Yorkshire Dales there is a natural expanse of flat rock where, in the 18th and 19th Centuries, women “danced the web”. They would spread their newly woven cloth (known as “web”) on the rocks, moisten it and then stomp on it with their bare feet. This made it thicker and so warmer, and all because of the dancing flags.
The dancing flags at Flintergill, near Dent. Picture: Alan Cleaver
L is for Limestone Pavement
THERE are about 2,600 hectares of limestone pavement in the country, nearly half of which is found in the Dales.
The pavement is formed when carboniferous limestone is dissolved by water over millions of years to create “clints” – flat slabs of rock. Between the clints are fissures and gullies known as "grykes”, and between them, the clints and the grykes look like a manmade pavement. They do, of course, provide unique habitats for plants either on the surface of the clints or in the shady, humid grykes.
The Limestone pavement in front of the Ribblehead Viaduct. Picture: Mark Corner
R is for Ribblehead Viaduct
THE viaduct is one of the stunning sights of the Dales, an amazing piece of brick and stonework appearing magically in the middle of nowhere – although the book tells how, when it was built in 1869 to 1871, it was surrounded by people.
The impressive Ribblehead Viaduct
“You can still see the outline of the Batty Green construction camp,” says the author Mike Appleton. “Here there were offices and shops, a small town of wooden shacks. A little further down the road, to the right, was a smallpox hospital.”
A tramway can be traced to the brickworks which turned out 20,000 bricks a day for the 1.5m used in the viaduct.
“Brickworkers were houses in a shanty town on the moor called Sebastopol – named after the Crimean War siege of 1855 – with Inkerman, Jericho, Jerusalem and Belgravia nearby. There were 150 huts between Batty Moss and Dent Head and, according to the 1871 census, they had more than 1,000 men, women and children living in them, many of whom died during the construction due to accidents and smallpox.”
S is for Stalling Busk Church
The remains of the old Stalling Busk church above Semerwater. Picture: Mark Corner
THE church was built in 1603 on common land between the small village and Semerwater – the second largest natural lake in the Dales – but when the Reverend Frederick Squibb became the vicar of Askrigg and Stalling Busk in 1906, he wanted a church in the village, so a new one was built, with the old one’s roof timbers and windows sold to finance the project.
“The new church is a welcoming place but what is surprising is how well the old site remains,” says the book. “It can still be seen on a short walk from the village, looking over the serene Semerwater.”
Y is for the Yorkshire Yeti
IN 1949 in the Dales, a dozen sheep were killed by an animal that wasn’t a dog – an animal that returned every autumn and winter for its bloody feast, with another 20 sheep being killed between 1956 and 1961 by something farmers said was definitely not a dog.
Some said it was the Black Shepherd – the evil twin of the Night Shepherd who is a mysterious good chap who brings sheep safely back to pasture during the night. Others thought it was the barguest, a huge black dog with immense teeth and claws that is known to live in Troller’s Gill, near Appletreewick at the south of the Dales.
But then in 1955, with the dead sheep count mounting, eyewitnesses found huge footprints in the snow and then everyone knew what they were up against: it was the Yorkshire Yeti.
And it is out there still.
A-Z of the Yorkshire Dales: Places, People, History, by Mike Appleton (Amberley, £15.99). All the today’s pictures of the Dales are taken from the well illustrated book.
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