THE GHOSTS OF GAITSCALE. — BLACK POWDER PRESS

A little way from the Three Shires Stone the ‘cloud born’ Duddon rises through the bright mosses and briskly gathers strength from the steep fellsides above Wrynose Bottom. Halfway between the Wrynose and Hardknott Passes, on the north side of this now brawling mountain stream, are the ruins of the former farmstead of Gaitscale, abandoned in the last quarter of the 18th century and in ruins two decades later.

It goes unnoticed by most except perhaps when the late light rakes up the valley into the great basin of the fells and its gables, stripped to the bone, stand sharp above the surrounding field walls. On short winter days it remains in the tawny shade of this ‘sad ground’ of crag, bracken and bog, the only brightness the mercurial filigree of springs and becks flowing ‘torrent white’.

The winter starts in November but still in April the snow might still fall and when the fields down in the Duddon are clear, here it stubbornly lies. Fifty years ago the tenant at Black Hall, a little way down the valley, told how the last occupant of Gaitscale, two hundred years since, had left abruptly after a particularly savage winter destroyed his flock. He also told the curious tale of a genetic aberration, the story has it that the sheep of Gaitscale were in possession of an extra rib and apparently as proof of this, the skeleton of one had been preserved in a London Museum.

Few references to this area are found in the early guidebooks. The Duddon, with its absence of a lake, elicited little curiosity in the Lake tourist until, of course, Wordsworth published his love song to the river. More intrepid perhaps than his contemporaries was William Green, who on a number of sketching tours from his home in Ambleside, ventured westwards to Wasdale and Eskdale. On returning from one of these expeditions in 1807 via Hardknott Pass, ‘incommoded by showers’, he took refuge at Black Hall Farm. Invited to stay for dinner with Mr Tyson and his family, Green learned much of the area including that Gaitscale or ‘Great Scale’, as he referred to it, had been abandoned some years previously and that its land had long since been rented by Black Hall. An hour or so later on route to Ambleside, he will have passed the unlit windows of the derelict farm, the hearth twenty years cold, its occupation already a distant memory.

Most of the present ruins date from the mid 17th century. A single range, extends east to west, consisting of the house, with hearth and cupboard recess, flanked by a barn at the eastern end and two later, probably early 18th century outhouses, at the western end. To the north is a steeply sloping outshut, also added later, and possibly housing a pantry and stairwell. The barn to the east appears be of the same phase as the house, constructed of surface gathered rubble with massive quoins.

Viewed from above in slanting light there is evidence of the ring garth enclosing a scattered range of folds, outhouses, field boundaries, clearance cairns, together with the ghost of a walled trackway and the corduroy of cultivated plots lying to the south. However the name has Norse origins, Gait meaning ‘goat’ and scale ‘shieling’ or seasonal house, which suggests that there was a settlement here long before the present farm was constructed.

Former shielings such as Gaitscale gradually became established as permanent farms from the late mediaeval period. Valley bottom land was let to tenants and farming centred on small scale cultivated strips, separated from the grazing land on the fellsides by a stone wall known as a ‘ring garth’. Tenants paid for rights for summer grazing on fell land, which in the Duddon was part of the medieval hunting forest of Millom, as well as access to resources such as peat for fuel and bracken for animal bedding and thatch.

By the mid-17th century, increased confidence on the part of tenants led to greater investment in the infrastructure of the farming landscape. Solidly constructed, slate-roofed houses, barns and outhouses appeared, and with them a drive towards land improvement. Inbye fields in the valley were drained using stone-lined culverts, put under the plough and treated with lime. The process of intaking land outside the former ‘ring garth’ continued as sheep became increasingly important with the expansion of the woollen industry. The legacy of this time is littered around the fells in the ruins of stone structures used in sheep rearing: shepherds’ huts and shelters, bields to protect sheep in severe weather, sheep dubs (for washing sheep), as well as tracks and small areas of cleared land to improve grazing.

However, long before Gaitscale, a route below the present Gaitscale Close had existed for over a millennium between Eskdale and the head of Windermere. As a road over the Passes it was to the Romans the ‘Tenth Highway’, built to link the coastal fort at Ravenglass with their garrisons at Ambleside and Kendal. Running alongside the infant Duddon through Wrynose Bottom, traces of it may be followed on the north side of the river until it crosses just beyond Gaitscale Close and again at Cockley Beck, and except for short distances which coincide with the modern road, it appears and disappears as a boggy footpath. Eventually it become an unpaved packhorse route used to transport lead and agricultural goods, and known by the Middle Ages as the Waingate ‘cart road’ or Wainscarth ‘cart pass’.

In the eighteenth century it gained some notoriety as a ‘snuff pack road’, one of two specific routes from Whitehaven, over Hard Knott and Wrynose Passes to Ambleside and onwards to the centre of the industry at Kendal. It was also more widely used for the movement of supplies of illicit spirits from remote western Lakeland to the towns further south and east.

When Norman Nicholson first visited in 1929, he described the scene as ‘something about as remote as Iceland’ and the Passes still just ‘wild tracks’. During the Second World War the army had used the area for tank training, completely destroying any existing road surface. After the war the damage was repaired and the road tarmacked, creating a direct motor route between Ambleside and Eskdale for the first time.

A lingering reminder of Gaitscale Farm lies a few miles down the valley at Seathwaite Church. A newspaper report of September 1939 relates how the Gaitscale clipping stool favoured by the Rev. Robert ‘Wonderful’ Walker came to be reused as a base for the church sundial. His life and labours are well recorded, originally in the contemporary 18th century ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ and later famously by Wordsworth. Born of farming stock at Undercrag, the vicar of Seathwaite was well known as the handiest man in the valley. A scholar of Latin and Hebrew, a scrivener and teacher, he could also spin and weave his own wool, cobble boots, farm his own glebe land and clip with the best of the farmers. He was undoubtedly admired by all for his ability and industry, but most of all for his service to the small community.

That service included joining in the local communal sheep clipping which took place early in July. At Gaitscale, while most of the clippers used wooden forms, Walker preferred a stone, which lay against the wall of the fold; perfectly shaped for its purpose. For the 180 years after Walker finished his work the stone lay undisturbed until, in 1939, permission was given for it to be removed and reused at Seathwaite. Two local farmers using a motor car and trailer crossed the Duddon, drove up the steep hillside, removing and later rebuilding sections of wall. The stone was hoisted into the trailer, before retracing their six-mile route, one mile of which was roadless and necessitated driving along the bed of the river for some distance. Finally, it was placed outside the porch of the church, a fitting memorial to the former vicar and a man who moved seamlessly between his spiritual, scholarly and manual labours with equal respect.

In the winter silence it is often difficult to perceive the life that was here at Gaitscale, to look beyond the hardship and time’s hunger for destruction. There is a quiet despondency that leeches from the damp walls. Yet these stubborn ruins, and all the cleared stone fields around, bear witness to the hope that once flourished here. Somewhere in the spaces between the stones there is the memory of those countless nights when the lights of Gaitscale shone like a beacon to lighten the heart of the benighted traveller and the weary packman as the fellsides closed in. There may now be silence but sometimes it sings with the clatter of packhorse hooves strung out along the track below Gaitscale Close; or the high summer mummer of voices at clipping time two centuries ago. And afterwards, in the deep mauve of a summers evening, the ‘merry meets’ with fiddle music scratching out across the fellsides and into the great basin of Wrynose.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine February 2024.