Vanished industrial past of the Yorkshire Dales

Most visitors to the Yorkshire Dales will take away with them memories of a landscape dominated by all things rural. Stone-built clusters of houses, field barns scattered across the landscape, hundreds of miles of drystone walls enclosing well-kept pastures in the valleys with open fells rising beyond, are the mental images that most people would conjure up.

Those who have explored areas like Yarnbury above Grassington or Gunnerside Gill above Swaledale will know of the lead mining industry that was such a key part of life and work in parts of the Dales until little more than a century ago. Some will have noted the presence of old textile mills – for example in Skipton, between Settle and Langcliffe, and at Gayle Mill near Hawes.

These are all obvious clues to an industrial past. The mine spoilheaps and the textile mills are as visible as those other great and treasured industrial monuments – the soaring viaducts on the Settle-Carlisle railway that enabled goods to be moved in and out of the western part of the Dales.

What many people may not realise is that for several centuries industry was much more widespread across the Dales and that almost every valley and community had a range of small-scale crafts and trades.

Some were carried out by specialists – the millers, the blacksmiths and wheelwrights, the basket makers, those who made carts – but many were part-time occupations for farmers and even inn keepers.

Communities were self-sufficient as much as possible and made whatever they could locally.

Evidence for these lost trades is not always easy to find on the ground but it is there, sometimes as earthworks, sometimes as names on a map or maybe just as folk memory.

Several of these rural trades needed lime in the manufacturing process.

One such trade was making soap. Apart from washing clothes and other household needs, soap was needed locally for preparing wool and for dyeing cloth.

It was made by burning bracken or other plant material to get potash. This was mixed with water and lime to make the soap.

Tanning was a very common trade in parts of the Dales, especially between Settle and Stainforth, and Settle in particular was renowned as a centre for producing leather and leather goods.

The skins, or hides, had the hair scraped off them before they were soaked for up to a week in vats made of blue slate from quarries at Helwith Bridge.

Lime was added to the water to loosen the outer unwanted layers on the hides before they were taken out and dried to be given their final scraping.

After this they were again soaked in a solution which contained either human urine or bird droppings.

The stench must have been unimaginable, but most villages had their own shoemakers (or cordwainers) who needed a ready supply of leather, as did those who made leather aprons.

Nowadays paper is made in huge mills from wood pulp but in past centuries it was made in small-scale workshops in villages which had a stream running nearby.

One village in the Dales had 14 papermakers listed in the 1841 census.

This paper was made from cotton and linen rags. The first job was to thoroughly clean the rags before bleaching them in a tank, or vat, with a mixture of lime and water. .Then the rags were beaten to a pulp from which the paper was made. These are just three examples of rural crafts that needed a local supply of lime, but it had many other uses, too. It was used to make lime mortar for building in the days before cement came on the market, as well as for whitewashing walls inside buildings and for coating the outside walls of houses to make them weatherproof.

It was spread on stone floors to stop rising damp and was also used to make roofing slates watertight.

To farmers, lime was indispensable and in many different ways.

Even within living memory it was used to store eggs in to stop them going off.

The eggs were laid in a barrel and covered in lime layer by layer to be stored in the pantry to be used throughout the coming winter.

Oat and barley seeds were dipped in lime to protect them against fungal disease before planting in the fields.

In the days before chemical treatments became available, several cattle diseases were treated using lime.

One method was called “need-fire”. The farmer made a smoky bonfire in a confined space, sprinkled lime on the fire and a few aromatic herbs, and slowly drove the cattle one by one through the smoke so that they would inhale the smoke and fumes… and be cured.

There is even one tale from long ago of a farmer who sent all his cows through the smoke and then made his sickly wife do the same!

Farmers also used lime as a disinfectant in cow sheds and byres to keep disease at bay and it was used during the foot and mouth tragedy of 2001 to clean up cow sheds on farms where cattle and sheep had been slaughtered.

The main uses in farming, however, were to make heavy and damp soils easier to work and to improve the quality of pastures.

To do this limestone was burned in lime kilns to turn it into quicklime which was spread on the fields and left for the rain and moist air to slake, or break down.

Across the Yorkshire Dales National Park there are the remains of well over 1,000 lime kilns. Most, called field kilns, were quite small and date from the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

Many were only used for a short period, perhaps when a new piece of pasture was being improved from the open moor and never used again. Others were just fired up every few years to top-dress pastures.

Other kilns were operated on a commercial basis, and these did operate year on year. Early to mid nineteenth-century commercial kilns were just larger versions of field kilns, and they were often built alongside a railway line or road so that the quicklime could easily be delivered to customers from far and wide.

In some cases a battery of kilns was built, rather than a single kiln. These may have had two or even three bowls (in which the stone was burned) and two or more arches through which burnt lime was drawn from the base of the bowl.

Several entrepreneurs within Craven invented and built improved designs of commercial kilns – men like John Winskill father and son of Settle, or Henry Robinson of Skipton, or PW Spencer of Lothersdale.

On an even grander scale were the two Hoffmann lime kilns at the Craven Limeworks near Langcliffe and in Mealbank Quarry at Ingleton.

These were German inventions which were able to produce burnt lime in huge quantities very efficiently. The Craven kiln worked from 1873 to 1939, the Ingleton kiln from 1868 to 1909.

Both were linked to the railway network and sent lime to chemical plants, steelworks, chocolate and silk factories, as well as to farmers and builders.

Dr David Johnson is the author of Limestone Industries of the Yorkshire Dales, Amberley Publishing, £18.99. To order your copy, ring our order line 01748 821122 Mon-Sat 9am-5pm. Or by post, please send a cheque or postal order, plus £2.75 postage, to Yorkshire Books Ltd, 1 Castle Hill, Richmond, DL10 4QP. Order online, www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/shop.

Giving history a future

By the mid-1960s, most commercial lime kilns had been shut down as environmental concerns made them no longer viable.

Field kilns went out of use before the Second World War. Nowadays, if a farmer wants his fields liming he hires a contractor to spread crushed limestone dust – quicklime is no longer used on the land.

There are tentative plans to devise a themed trail to link various industrial sites across the Dales. If properly promoted, they would provide a new set of visitor attractions and bring more income into the local economy.