The discovery of the Yorkshire Dales

Colin Speakman reviews a book which traces six centuries of travellers to the Dales and touching on how the landscape and attitudes have changed in that time.

A RECENT visitor (2020) survey confirmed the Yorkshire Dales to be Britain’s favourite National Park. So what are the special qualities that make the Yorkshire Dales so popular?

For most people it is the landscape, which in many parts of the Dales reflect an almost perfect harmony between man and nature, the wild fell summits, the deep valleys of rich green pasture, scattered farms, barns and drystone walls. We talk of “natural beauty” , yet so much of this landscape is not “natural” but reflects thousands of years of human occupation.

But it is a landscape in so many important ways we have been taught to love. A new book The Discovery of the Yorkshire Dales, (Palatine Books) by Chris Park, a retired academic who now lives in Lancaster, traces six centuries of travellers to the Yorkshire Dales, a period during which attitudes to the landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales have dramatically changed.

Early farmers and settlers had neither the time nor the skills to describe where they were, but up to the 18th century writers such as author of Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe in 1724 could dismiss parts of Craven where he saw “nothing but high mountains, which had a terrible aspect” . Years later the agriculturalist Arthur Young could admire the neat fields of the Dales but regretted that the moors above Wensleydale had not been improved into useful pasture.

Things were to change in the late 18th century when writers such as naturalist and topographer Thomas Pennant (1726-98) having explored, Ireland, Scotland and the Lakes, came the Dales in the 1770s to celebrate its “picturesque” sites. It was the caves, the crags and the waterfalls that made gentlemen travellers such as Thomas West and William Gilpin seek out the “curiosities” and places deemed to be “sublime”, such as Gordale Scar where poet Thomas Gray came to be duly thrilled. Soon to follow were the painters such as Thomas Girtin, David Cox and greatest of all William Turner.

By the 19th century together with the growth and improvements of turnpike roads, it was the popularity of the Romantic movement, hugely influenced by that great walker-poet William Wordsworth, that shaped our love of wild, open landscapes and of rambling that remains such a potent force. Wordsworth was a frequent visitor to the Dales and wrote poems about the area. But literally in his footsteps came later generations of painters, poets and essayists such as John Ruskin, Walter White and John Leyland, and women traveller-writers such as Mary Howitt and Ann Wilson.

Chris Park traces the generations of antiquarians who sought ruined abbeys and castles to be described in flowery prose, then the scientists such as geologists Adam Sedgwick and john Phillips who first saw the remarkable rock formations and caves of the Dales as being worthy of scientific study. The coming of the railways, brought a new generation of visitors, including guidebooks writers enthusing newly literate lower middle-class audiences about where to walk from Dales railway stations. It is probable that the name “Yorkshire Dales” only came into regular use in the 1930s as a result of railway company posters.

By the end of the 19th century some serious historians were explaining the rich and sometimes extraordinary stories of the Dales, men such as Harry Speight and William Grainge. But perhaps partly as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and revulsion at the pollution of Victorian and Edwardian cities, there emerged what might be described as the “sentimental” school of writers such as Edmund Bogg and, in the 1930s, Halliwell Sutcliffe, who offered a rose-tinted, nostalgic view of the past that often had little connection with harsh reality. By the mid-20th century , writers and historians such as Ella Pontefract, Joan Ingilby and Arthur Raistrick, and in more recent times the prolific former Dalesman editor Bill Mitchell, were offering many well researched books on the Dales,

What is special about Chris Park’s new book is its comprehensive nature, detailing the work and life stories of not only the well-known figures but also some minor names who deserve to be remembered. His Bibliography contains what is probably one of the most comprehensive listing of Dales authors, making this book a valued contribution and reference book to what might be described as Yorkshire Dales Studies.

Park is probably correct in suggesting that most people in our time take their perception of the Dales less from books, more from films and television programmes, such as the new hugely popular James Herriot series, which are after all, based on Alf Wight’s original books.

In every period, our views and understanding of the Yorkshire Dales change. Herriot books and films present us with a simpler view of the rural past to contrast with our new Age of Anxiety. To take a current example, the books and films of Amanda Owens in Swaledale offer us an alternative to the artificial world of computer screens and i-phones: a working Dales farm and lifestyles of a family attuned to the natural world and the seasons.

Through the efforts of so many writers, photographers and film makers, the landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales therefore still fulfil a powerful need, helping us share a vision of ways of life within those landscapes which for the sake of our physical and mental well-being we need to relate to and reconnect with.