North Yorks Dales Cottage Gardens, Arkengarthdale

Once a busy and industrial dale, today Arkgengarthdale, the Forgotten Dale as it is sometimes known, is remoter and emptier than Swaledale and Wensleydale. The single road through the dale begins in Reeth and goes up over Tan Hill, connecting Swaledale with Teesdale. The route, once used to drive thousands of cattle down to the rich meadows in Swaledale from Scotland for fattening, became a tourist road in the twentieth century. Since then, motorists have been climbing up Arkengarthdale's "... steep slopes, bend(ing) round becks and gills, and pursue(ing) its lonely way past scars and peat hags."[i] Today all that remains of those motoring days is a rusting petrol pump in Langthwaite.

Lead mining in Arkengarthdale

Until the end of the nineteenth century, Arkengarthdale was particularly rich in minerals - lead, coal, slate and chertz in particular. Its smelting mill was the most productive in the country, so much so that the dale was bought and sold by various absentee landlords. The Lord of Richmond made a profit of £4 a year on the lead mines in 1285. In 1628, Charles I sold the dale to the citizens of London who owned it until 1655 when Dr Bathurst first leased the rights to the mines from them for £3 10s. Thereafter the Bathurst family in effect owned the dale and its contents until the end of the nineteenth century.

Hill farming and lead mining

Hill farming has been carried out on the marginal lands of the northern Pennine dales for centuries and it has never paid a living wage (in 2009 £7K was the average that could be earned from hill farming). Dales people have to be self-reliant, including growing food where other people wouldn't consider it possible. It has always been essential that all members of the family combine seasonal farming tasks such as lambing and haymaking with any other work. CS Hallas states "Miners worked a six day week but those with farming interests adapted their mining activities to the requirements of the farming year" [ii]. When there is additional employment, such as lead mining until the end of the nineteenth century and tourism today, the population of the dale is static. In times of depression people of working age leave. Even before the last mine closed in 1913, the dale had lost 35% of its working population.

Evidence for growing food in Arkengarthdale

Very little is recorded about how people in Arkengarthdale grew vegetables and fruit. For the moment enough can be extrapolated from what has been written on the neighbouring dales of Swaledale and Teesdale and the recordings made for the Dales, Plants and Gardens project. The people that the Dales project has spoken with can remember back to the 1920s and 30s when their parents and uncles worked as lengthsmen, blacksmiths, inn-keepers and gardeners at the shooting lodge Scar House and, like the lead miners, every one of them took their holidays haymaking with relatives.

The average height of land in Arkengarthdale is 1000 feet and 2000 feet on the moors. Baker and Tate in 1868 recorded that most miners without smallholdings had gardens. Their report listed the plants that miners grew on the high ground of Teesdale (elevation 2,000 feet) which were turnips, rhubarb, and potatoes. Durham had been a trading centre for potatoes cultivated in the north for at least 90 years. In addition the report listed what miners in Allendale (elevation 1,600 feet) were able to grow which included cabbages, lettuces, onions, carrots, plums, raspberry and currant bushes [iii].

Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and vegetable growing land

Land enclosure had little effect on the basic farming patterns of the northern dales; the land has always been too poor for any significant arable farming. If anything, the Enclosure Acts made it easier for land to be made over to rural allotments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as pieces of land too small or too awkward to be farmed were either sub-let to miners or made over first to potato garths and later to allotments and small-holdings.

Mining companies such as the Quaker owned London Lead Company managed the lives of its workers, even the self-employed miners, across the Pennine dales in a uniform way "in order to compensate such of our men as have not farms we endeavour to provide them with gardens" [iv]. The mining companies valued temperate, well-fed workers.

The miners worked a complex bargain system that enabled them to set their own hours during the week. Saturday working was uncommon and Sunday unknown.

Further information about how people found time and who helped them to grow produce in the Three Dales is available in two articles on this website, located in Explore/Feature Articles.

The need to grow food

Responses to the changing seasons, weather conditions, local soil characteristics and pests and diseases created a body of knowledge passed between generations. The ability to keep livestock and the knowledge of how to grow food was essential to the miner-farmers ability to subsist. In the early twentieth century there is a photograph (in the related photographic section to this entry) that shows the headmaster of the Quaker School in Reeth teaching the children to garden.

And just as with other workers who have gardened in the Pennine dales, the problem of storage in tiny cottages was solved by growing many different varieties of the same crop that ripened at different times and so could be kept in the ground until needed.

Sources

[i] Landmark Visitor Guide to Yorkshire Dales by Ron Scholes ISBN: 9781843062097 2nd ed Landmark Publishing Ltd

[ii] Hallas, C.S Economic and social change in Wensleydale and Swaledale in the 19th century (Open University Ph.D thesis, 1988)

[iii] Baker, J.G. & Tate, G.R. New Flora of Northumberland and Durham (1868) London

[iv] in Raistrick, A. Two centuries of industrial welfare, the London (Quaker) lead company 1692-1905 (1977)

Type

Garden

Purpose

Horticultural

Plant Environment

Plant Type

Principal Building

Agriculture And Subsistence

Survival

Extant

Open to the public

Yes