Category: Bransdale
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Gimmer Bank Under a Thickening Sky
Back to Gimmer Bank, on the west side of Bloworth Slack in Bransdale, where a block of young woodland needed some attention. The saplings went in two or three years ago, and self-sown conifers from the neighbouring forestry have taken a keen interest in the same ground. Left alone, they will smother the lot. A…
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The Dale That Nearly Went Back to Bracken
These tidy fields and stone walls look permanent. In 1948 nobody would have bet on it. Bransdale had 23 isolated farms and a shrinking population. Over twenty years, many farmers had moved to the plains to be nearer the towns, and those who remained could barely support a social life. Mr. T. Collier, who had…
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Bransdale End and the Bride on the White Ass
In the photo above, Breck House is that farmstead in the distance, over on the left, a small stone smudge against the great sweep of Bransdale. Easy to miss. Breck House is a working farmhouse, built for function, not for show, in coursed sandstone with a pantiled roof and no airs about it whatsoever. It…
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High Bloworth, with a view down Bransdale
Sheep have shaped the British uplands for centuries. Their grazing, by cattle too and, in the Tabular Hills, rabbits, kept the moors open and thriving. Now a proper row has broken out over how many sheep the moors can bear. Farmers say the recent drop in numbers is asking for trouble. Fewer sheep, more gorse…
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Elm Houses: A Story of Two Bransdale Farms
Tucked into a remote part of Bransdale, Elm Houses has a history worth telling. What is today one tidy holiday cottage surrounded by idle farm buildings was once two entirely separate farms: High and Low Elm House. On the right stands High Elm House, a long 18th-century range. A lintel stone dated 1780 records its…
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Valley Garden: Bluebells, Bog Plants and a Baffling Fern
In the early 1950s, Lord Feversham had a rather splendid idea. To keep his staff at Bransdale Lodge busy, he ordered a “wild garden” to be carved out of Gimmer Bank Wood, on the soggy banks of Blowith Slack, a tributary of Hodge Beck. In went azaleas, rhododendrons, flowering cherries and a good deal more…
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A New Corner of Bransdale
Someone went to extraordinary lengths to block up what was once a field gate. It sits in a tangle of old inbye fields to the west of St. Catherine’s House in Bransdale. The field boundaries appear on the oldest Ordnance Survey maps, so the dry-stone wall and its two gateposts, or “stoops”, were almost certainly…
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Cockayne: The Land of Milk, Honey, and Mumbling Clerks
Medieval peasants dreamed of a place called Cockaigne — a land of luxury and ease where roasted pigs wandered about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, grilled geese flew directly into one’s mouth, and the wine flowed freely. Streets paved with pastry. Skies that rained cheese. You get the idea. Then someone…
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Bloworth Slack—Not as Lazy as It Sounds
Bloworth Slack, just moments before it meets Badger Gill to become Hodge Beck. Bransdale again — but today we’ve been beside this quietly lovely woodland stream, its amber rocks lit by a sky so clear it almost seems rude. I never took Geography at ‘O’ Level. I was a science boy, apparently, and Geography was…
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The Duncombe Drive: Lost in Plain Sight
Repairs to fencing offered a rare glimpse into a part of Bransdale not open to the public. The photograph shows Hall Plantation, where a line of beech trees accentuates what is clearly an old trackway, its course still visible beneath a deep carpet of last year’s leaves. The track has been sitting quietly here since…