THE RUINS OF BRETHERDALE.

Bretherdale, on the eastern fringes of the Lake District remains a mystery to most. A name vaguely familiar but never quite placed. Even my Cumbrian friends ask, slightly bemused, ‘is it somewhere in the Shap Fells?’. Mention of its proximity to the motorway and already they have lost interest. It is a place of contradictions, with glowing hay meadows and ancient woodland, and yet at Bretherdale Head all is in ruins. The farmsteads of Scale Howe, The Riggs, Parrocks, Greenhead, Bridge End and the farmhouse at Dalehead are all abandoned and in different stages on the same path to oblivion. It is unsettling, although less perhaps from the decay of architecture than the stark evidence of lives lived, the remnants of a community which has quietly dissipated, leaving the sense of absence heavy in the air.

A pattern defined by the amalgamation of small farms into larger holdings was established during the early 20thcentury and replicated throughout these unloved fells and beyond. What remains are the remnants of linear houses and bank barns in laithe house arrangements following, unsurprisingly given Bretherdale’s location and historical connections, a tradition more allied to the Yorkshire Dales than the central Lakes.

Whichever way you interpret it, there is something picturesque in the origin of the dale’s name. The 18thcentury antiquarians Nicholson and Burn believed it to be a reference to briars. Others have suggested an Old Norse derivation as ‘the brothers’ valley’ which may perhaps relate to the fact that, from the 12th century until dissolution, the valley was owned by the monks (brethren) of Byland Abbey, renowned as sheep farmers on the first truly commercial scale.

Several of the buildings in Bretherdale have ‘scale’ or sheiling placenames, suggesting their origins in former summer grazing lands. From the 17th century onwards, intakes enclosed by drystone walls were extended into the formerly unenclosed commons, and land at their upper extent occupied by farmsteads and outbarns, very probably on earlier sites. The remote Scale Howe at the head of the valley, with typical layout and nearby clearance cairns, simple slate footbridges and sheepfolds, is a good example of this.

The ruined farmstead at Bridge End on the valley floor is one of the few recognisably early houses, dating from the ‘great rebuilding’ of the 17th century. Constructed of slate and river cobbles, with a single-storey gabled porch protecting the central entrance, there is evidence within the stonework of numerous alterations and additions, including the raising of the roof level. Still occupied into the second half of the 19th century, by 1915 it was derelict, although the outbuildings continued in use.

Beside the farm is an extraordinary structure, a footbridge forming a flying span of fine Bannisdale flags. It seems curiously insubstantial and, from the evidence of arching stonework in the bank, may have replaced an earlier packhorse bridge. Here the waters of Bretherdale Beck, dyed amber from the peaty fells, slide under the sycamore trees and over a cobbled ford. A track rises to the south, terraced into the hillside to form a wide green lane, enclosed by the remnants of a hawthorn hedge. Probably mediaeval in origin it is likely to have been an early packhorse route, avoiding the marshy valley bottom.

Of the people who lived here, Bridge End Farm was the home of the Thompson family from at least the early 18th century. Isabel and Thomas Thompson both died here in the same year, 1742. A hundred years later the tithe award lists John and Thomas Thompson as owner occupiers and the 1851 census records a Thomas Thompson as resident along with his 19-year-old niece Margaret as his housekeeper.

The Wilson family for many generations had Dale Head Farm and also bought the farm at Parrocks a little higher up the valley in 1785. The original farmhouse was demolished, and a new house built around 1900, this too has now been abandoned.

Above Bridge End are the ruins of the little farmstead of Greenhead, owned and farmed in the mid 19th century by Thomas and Margaret Potter. The Rigg close by was also occupied at this time and at Scale Howe at the top of the valley George Mounsey farmed with is son. In fact all the houses of upper Bretherdale appear to have been occupied until at least the end of the 19th century.

On the far side of the Breast High Road, beyond the Thunder Stone is Knott House where at the end of the18th century Joseph Robinson, better known as ‘Joseph o’ the Knott’ or ‘Jossy with the whips’ lived. Famously, he went about the district bedecked with peacock feathers and foxes’ tails, always carrying two or three whips. Honest and inoffensive, his eccentricity might have had its root in his love of stories, for he always carried a few books with him. Jossy was laid to rest around 1812 in Orton churchyard.

And then there was William Thwaites of Parrocks Farm who in 1929, wrote a short account of his life in Bretherdale on the back of a Wesleyan Methodist Circuit Plan for Kirkby Stephen and Appleby. It is a remarkable account. William went to work with his uncle at Scale Howe Farm in around 1868, incredibly at the age of eight. At this time there were still six working farms at Bretherdale Head. He had no education and although there was a Sunday school two miles away, he was never sent. As he says himself, experience was his teacher and what he didn't get that way he had to do without. He describes how he went without stockings in summer and ‘sometimes my toes looked out of my clogs’. Only a year after he arrived his aunt died and one of his sisters was sent for to keep house. ‘We used to get porridge night and morning and occasionally at noon, if we were not satisfied, we had a chance of a cup of milk and bread’. William continued at the farm until his uncle died and then took over the neighbouring farm at Parrocks along with The Riggs. He and his wife raised six children here. A neighbouring child remembering him as an elderly man remained fascinated by his ability to blow out candles with a silent jet of air. He died in 1949 at the age of 91.

In 2005, the high ground between Bretherdale and neighbouring Borrowdale, became the scene of a fierce environmental dispute with plans to build what, at the time, would have been England’s largest wind farm along the Whinash ridge. While environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth backed the proposals, local conservationists opposed them and won the backing of local luminaries Melvyn Bragg and Chris Bonington as well as botanist David Bellamy. After a passionately argued public inquiry, the plans were rejected. A representative of the British Wind Energy Association expressed his incredulity that anyone would wish to visit this area except to see the turbines, ‘you are not going get visitors within earshot of the M6 any other way. Why would people want to walk there otherwise?’

Last summer I brought my friend, the Lake District writer and photographer, Bill Birkett here to see the old hay meadows below Midwathstead. We stood for a while on the bridge and marvelled at the dark erratic undercurrent of trout fry in Bretherdale Beck. The motorway could have been a hundred miles away, drowned out by the summer hum and the relentless cuckoos in Bretherdale’s ancient woodland. We watched a red dear with her two fawns beside the ruins of Parrocks and up on Whinash Edge, saw a large dog fox, pale as the grassland, sidle off across the fellside. Bill told me, perhaps a little sadly, this place reminded him of the Lakeland of his childhood.

I found this same sense of a place conjured from memory and brough back to life, in a Westmorland dialect poem written by Joseph Thwaites, who farmed at Parrocks. ‘Some say it is world’s end’ he writes, ‘But the air is pure and the water’s good/ The flowers are beautiful in hue/ The fragrance sweet as iver grew/The birds they sing, the cuckoo’s shout/ This place would charm the heart of owt’. It is a long poem, in places almost indecipherable, about place and community, remembrance of childhood and small pleasures. As much a lament for the lost as a love song, it brought me back to those famous lines from The Wasteland, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’

No one now lives at Bretherdale Head. All that remains are fragments of a scattered narrative to be pieced back together. Those little farms with their garths and meadows, their folds and slab bridges and carefully planted sycamore trees recalling whole lives lived within the confines of these hard hills. At Greenhead we searched for scraps and secrets but found no more than a dead sheep and a single coat hook, no doubt made by the blacksmith in Orton, which has stubbornly refused to budge though the ceiling has now comfortably settled on the floor. Ruins, by definition, are engines of speculation and as I learned something, however fragmentary about the lives lived here, a sense of unease took root. The more I have discovered about this landscape, for all its wonders, the sadder it has become.

First published in Cumbria and Lakeland Walker August 2024.