Stockdale And The Pennines

It is always exhilarating walking

It is always exhilarating walking. Cold airs urged us upwards; on the skyline we were enveloped in snow, feathery flakes falling lightly but only faintly dimming the spreading loveliness of the prospect from Nappa Gate. Here we stood, using the top wall for shelter, on the Pennine watershed. We had put behind us Stockdale which runs to the Ribble and the Irish Sea; ahead was a country wherein are springs feeding the becks which join the Aire and run (as Kingsley tells us in the Water Babies) from the fair green dales through the black towns before they reach the Humber and the North Sea. After a swift descent to the Cove Road, half an hour and we were 'in Malham.

It was an exciting halfhour, for we reached the village by way of the Cove, descending from Nappa Gate, from the pitlike calamine workings, down steps of weathered lime stone and steep slopes of close bitten turf. Across the Cove road we followed a trod across the pastures to the upper edge of Malham Cove, the semicirque profound of Words worth's poem. The winds here were piping loud and to approach the edge of the cliff would have been fraught with peril, yet far and away below us was Airedale cradled in calm, the curdled snow clouds had gone and the sun slept on the tiny walled in fields.

The downward view is impressive in the extreme, to the deep cove below, from which a clear stream winds its way over the greenest dale floor, to Cawden and the widening valley, to the raking steeps on either hand, each with its network of walls, and irregular intakes, no two alike in shape. Some have terraced strip lynchets, run ning along the contouring of the fellside, signs of old cultivation, all petering out at the upper edge of the broken scars. History is written on the tilted acres. On the far edge of the Cove is a pre-Roman burial mound later named the Friars' Heap or Monks' Grave about the period when almost all the landscape features were Fountains Abbey or Bolton Priory land. Prior Hall, Abbots' Hills, Prior Rakes, Friars' Garthyes, and Fountains Fell and Parson's Pulpit, too, were named at the same time. Malhamdale then was a vast deer park providing the lord abbot with venison and game; Malgh Water gave the brethren inexhaustible store of excellent trout and perch.

All the upland we surveyed from our high stand had in the Middle Ages been sheep walks for great flocks owned by abbot or prior, and all the gentle dales had been grazing land for dairy cows or beef cattle. No land produces sweeter mutton than the limestone country; once the ewes of Malhamdale were milked by women in the prior's employ and the cheese they made much appreciated at the Priory. At one time there was some concern about the local dairymaids in monastic circles; finally the prior sent out an order that henceforth only old and ill favoured females should be employed.

by: Adrian Vultur

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