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True grit Dales-style as focus falls on farm life
THEY had the grit and determination to tame the wild Yorkshire landscape and to scrape a sometimes precarious living from the land, some for several generations.
And now a handful of Yorkshire farming families who helped create the landscape we now know as the Nidderdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty have been celebrated by their descendents and the villagers who relied on them for much of the staple food they ate .
A handful of local historians with the Nidderdale Chase Heritage Group have provided a vivid portrait in an exhibition of farming life in the 20th century on the Wath estate, a private 2,500-acre estate near Pateley Bridge.
Of the five farms originally on the estate, only three remain.
Although Spring Wood Top Farm has not been occupied since around the 1970s there is no shortage of information about its history, thanks to Pateley Bridge woman Mabel Peacock, who is now in her mid-90s.
Mrs Peacock, whose lived at the farm for 44 years until the 1980s, recalled the harsh realities of farm life but also some of the luxuries she enjoyed, along with her husband and their six children.
“We had a proper bathroom with a bath and a toilet; none of the other farms in the area had an indoor toilet, so I always told my children they were very lucky that they didn’t have to go down the garden,” she told the history project.
The family may have had an indoor toilet but occasionally they did not have running water during harsh winters.
In the late 1960s a particularly bad cold spell caused the Peacock family serious hardship for several months, she recalled.
“There was a big snowstorm in about 1967,” she said.
““The water froze on New Year’s Day and we had no water until Easter Sunday.
“We led the water from a trough at the back of the house and we could only get at it with a cup and a bucket.”
The Peacock family kept hens, geese, ducks, turkeys and had sheep and pigs. Occasionally one of the sheep would wander off and fall into a nearby quarry.
Nowadays there might be a fire station crew to help rescue a stranded sheep but in those days they did everything themselves. Once, Mrs Peacock’s husband Reg borrowed a boat, put it into the quarry lake and threw a rope around the errant sheep, pulling it into the water.
“They got the rope onto the tup, pulled it into the water and got it out,” recalled Mrs Peacock.
Another time the local postman, Denis Marshall, lowered himself down the quarry rockface on a rope to rescue the Peacock’s dog.
Despite the daily hardships the Peacocks continued to farm the land and produced foodstuffs enjoyed by many hundreds of other people in and around Pateley Bridge.
“We had sheep and pigs and sold milk. We took eggs, hens, geese, turkeys and ducks to Wetherhead’s butchers in Pateley Bridge,” she said.
Those locals who lent their support to the history project recalled a life very different to that of today.
Edward Masheder remembered a walk of about five miles to his school which he had to tackle when the weather was bad, which was often.
Mr Masheder was a child when his sister was taken ill and he had to go and live with his uncle Tom and aunt Ethel Newbould at Tenement Farm, which today is abandoned and falling down.
There are still some question marks about what happened to the farm and why. Tom Newbould was living there in 1911 and died in 1950 but it is believed that he moved out of the farm in 1939 and it is believed that it has been unoccupied ever since.
The view from Tenement Farm remained firmly in Mr Masheder’s mind’s eye many decades later. “They had a view of the Pennine range, with Whernside in the distance.
“The wind came from that direction and you could see the rain on its way down the valley. Sometimes I had to make a mad dash home to get some dry clothes.”
Saturday’s exhibition was staged at St Cuthbert’s Church of England Primary School, Pateley Bridge, and was attended by around 100 people.
Barry Nuttall, a member of the history project, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, said: “There was a great buzz as everybody talked to everybody else. There were relatives of some of the people whose stories are featured in the exhibition so we hope to be able to add to the material we already have.”
“I enjoyed reading the comments about the hard winters, the difficulties people faced and stories people told about walking into Pateley Bridge,” he added.
The exhibition lasted just three hours but the organisers hope to stage another one, with updated information and more photos, in the near future.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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