The 16th century antiquarian William Camden dismissed the North Pennines as a ‘lean, hungry waste’, and certainly on Alston Moor it is generally an overcoat or two colder than Penrith. Climbing up and away from the gentle Eden into these wind-ploughed uplands, the keenness of winter can take your breath away. Even in more benign seasons the high hills can lie sullen under mist or strafed by skirling cloud shadows. To W. H. Auden it was ‘the wet road between the chafing grass’ and the contours of industrial ruin. The dismantled washing-floors, snatches of tramline, pitheads and levels, gradually dissolving into the middle distance. Yet perhaps more than anything it is a landscape of contradictions, of history on the edge, set within tidal moorland boundaries, multi-layered and mercurial; difficult to get to know, yet more than worth the effort.
William Hutchinson, visiting the town of Alston in the 1790s, was singularly unimpressed. In his History of the County of Cumberland he describes Alston as, ‘…a small market town, meanly built … in a narrow valley over which mountains frowned with a melancholy sterility and nakedness.’ He goes on to complain about the bad roads, and the ‘mountainous, barren and inhospitable country’. In describing the weather he is positively enthusiastic, ‘…impending clouds stretching forth a dark and disconsolate curtain over the face of morning, rain beating vehemently against the windows, a few trees standing near the inn tossed by the heavy blasts which howled down the valley.’ He also makes the curious point that as the people are ‘generally subterraneous…in no place is there a greater scope for contemplating peculiarity and novelty of character.’ Sadly he fails to elaborate further.
Under such circumstances he can perhaps be forgiven for having failed to notice the curious array of vernacular buildings in Alston Moor, the special nature of which appears to have been largely overlooked until Jollies’ 1811 Cumberland Guide and Directory. Here are described a few buildings of a ‘singular construction’.
The walls of which are very thick and strong and besides the little well secured windows often contain a sort of portholes. The cattle and their owners reside under the same roof the former occupied the ground floor and the latter the upper story.
Rare survivals of vernacular buildings pre-dating the 17th century, include remnants found within the ruined farmstead at High Lovelady Shield, but what Jollie was referring to was Alston Moor’s most characteristic farmstead type, the bastle house. Built as a response to the harsh environment, narrow doored, squint eyed and belligerent, they also served against periods of insecurity and instability. Alston Moor stood in a precarious position, just to the south of the Middle Marches of the highly troubled and much ‘debated’ Anglo Scottish border and close enough to Tynedale to attract some fringe activity. It was, as Edmund Sandford describes in 1670, a ‘rich grassing ground with great herds of cattle and flocks of sheep’ where livestock represented a farmers most valuable movable asset. At Annet Walls near Alston, the 1672 probate inventory of yeoman farmer Thomas Walton gave no value for his house or land but solely for his movable goods, totalling just over £30. They include his horse, eight cows, five heifers, four carves and twenty sheep, with the rest of his household goods, valued at just £3.
Twenty years later Thomas Denton wrote that the people ‘live upon their stocks and convert most of their enclosures to meadows the place being too bleak and stony for arable ground’ yet there is evidence to the contrary. In 1730 the tenants of farms at Bales and Fairhill admitted that they had been growing oats and barley for the previous 15 years. As a reward for their efforts they were prosecuted for the non-payment of tithes.
By the mid 17th century bastle houses had become the predominant building type, encouraged by land leasing reforms which provided secure long-term tenancies, and consequently the confidence to invest in land and buildings. They were often strung along the contours in small groups as Thomas Denton describes, ‘straggling all over the parish as if they were afraid, one of another’. Generally they were built on a rectangular plan with a ground floor byre for the cattle and accommodation for the farmer and his family above, reached by means of a wooden ladder. Heather thatch was the preferred roofing material, the steep pitch associated with this material can be seen in roof scars at Lower Crossgill and Blagill.
Significantly the bastles of Alston Moor used flagstones on timber joists, rather than stone vaulting, to form the first floor, as evident at Annat Walls, Low Park and Middle Bayles. This local adaptation took advantage of the rising warmth from the cattle in winter and perhaps also, the more readily available materials. Even in the town of Alston the tradition persisted, with three storey, first floor entrance, bastle derivatives lining the older streets.
Most fundamental however to the development of the landscape of Alston Moor are the mineral veins, those stuttering black lines representing richly mineralized faults, which criss-cross the geological map to form the complex North Pennine orefield. From Roman times onwards lead and silver have been the region’s best known natural treasures. The 12th century mint in Carlisle obtained silver from Alston and lead was supplied for building work on the great monastery of Clairvaux in north-east France. Mining was so extensive at this early date that disputes arose concerning the excessive tree felling for use as fuel and pit props and remained a bone of contention for centuries to come.
Mines were leased to Germans in the 14th century and again in the 16th and passed through many hands, including the London Lead Company, a Quaker organization remarkable for its philanthropic ideals. At Nenthead the company built a whole new village, cottages with gardens, sanitation and a water supply, and since earnings had depended on the fluctuating price of lead, guaranteed a minimum wage. Production reached a peak in the early 19th century, fifty years later deposits were depleted, and cheaper foreign ores flooded the market. The London Lead Company abandoned the workings and the population fell into a steady and devastating decline.
Yet for some this ‘cradle of industrial desolation’ had a very particular appeal. It was the landscape which first inspired the 15-year-old W. H. Auden, tramping across a deserted moor in the North Pennines in the summer of 1922. At Sike Head shaft, on the slopes of Bolt's Law, he found the imagery that would haunt much of his later work, the poetry of ghosts and grey skies, shattered ironwork and rust. On the wall of his workroom at Fire Island in New York at the height of his fame, he hung a map of Alston Moor; yellowed and rolling at the edges, a treasure from his childhood.This expanse of moorland was his earthly paradise: ‘I could draw its map by heart, / Showing its contours, / Strata and vegetation/ Name every height/ Small burn and lonely sheiling…’ (Amor Loci, 1965).
Born two years later than Auden in the village of Nenthead, Eric Richardson the ‘mineral diviner’ shared this early fascination with the mines. As a boy he would creep into the workings when the miners were absent, or on Sundays, along with all the other village boys, gather there to ride the wagons. While Auden’s recollections from the 1920s were of dereliction, Eric recalled that the Alston Methodist Circuit could muster eighty local preachers including Jacob Hill the blind evangelist who raged from the pulpit. Then there were the community trips to the seaside which began with a procession of horses and carts to the railway station at Alston. He never forgot the clatter of clogs as the miners went to and from work or waiting at the mine entrance watching for the candle light that signified his father’s return.
Tragically Eric’s father died young the result of a mining accident, but despite this, Eric followed him down the mines, not only in Alston Moor and Teesdale but also the Lake District. In retirement the world beat a path to his door, geologists from Europe, professors from American universities, eager for his extraordinary knowledge and tangible link to the past. He continued to revisit those dark places, searching out traces of the ‘t’Awd’ men, as the past generations of miners were referred to, and discovering bats roosting in the abandoned levels threequarters of a mile from the open air. For Auden this was a place of revenants, for Eric it was a life-long, all consuming, fascination.
At Nenthead the almost lunar landscape of dereliction I remember from childhood has been reclaimed. Eyebright and harebells border the former smelting mills along with the extraordinary fleshy fern known as moonwort. The mountains of ‘deads’ have been colonized by the pale stars of pink and white spring sandwort. Even on the steepest, rawest banks of waste the blazing ragwort glories in its tenacity and mountain pansies scatter the long grass. Lichens encrust both stone and metal and, on the ground, form a biotic bark over the bare soil protecting it from erosion and allowing small bryophytes and plants to establish. Most important in this community are the microscopic fungi which grow on lichens, in Britain known only from five sites, all close to Nenthead.
Lapwings, redshank, snipe, and golden plover populate the moorland where fluorspar still glitters on the mountain tracks, and once on an early summer day under a mass of moth-eaten clouds I was stopped in my tracks by a reverberating rumble with the velocity of a chainsaw. It was in fact a mass gathering of fiercely chorusing frogs, what seemed like hundreds of them in the damp ditch and across the track, vying with each other in their rich baritones. But also there is the darker side of the moor, the crates of bewildered young birds imported to these high places for the sole purpose of being blasted to oblivion under the farcical conditions of the ‘driven’ grouse shoot. A mindless slaughter made more senseless by the use of high-powered modern weaponry, oxymoronically called ‘sport’, that leaves little to either chance or skill.
The historically much plundered North Pennines now remains one of England most unsuspected treasures. The town of Alston, a cobbled, vernacular gem at the crux of three counties and beyond the vast, tawny, hare-haunted uplands and sparsely populated dales, erupting every springtime with subalpine wild flowers. Flowing through them are the peaty gills and sikes that feed the great rivers of the North East. On Alston Moor in the height of summer, in a world of contrary winds and untidy perfection, I often wonder how such a place can remain so overlooked, but I am grateful that it is.
First published in Cumbria and Lakeland Walker November 2024.