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 farmed here for 30 years, remembered when every farm and cottage was occupied. Without help, the west side was expected to revert to heather and bracken within ten years. Help arrived as Lord Feversham’s £12,000 plan, the first scheme submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture under the Hill Farming Act 19461“Yorkshire Dale to begin new life”. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. 27 November 1948. Page 6.
The trouble was plain enough. Supplies were left two miles from the west-side farms and hauled home on carts and sledges. Farmers’ wives reached Kirbymoorside, ten miles away, once a week, in a vehicle that doubled as a hearse. The nearest telephone was seven miles off. When a sick farmer was cut off by drifts, an RAF mountain rescue team crossed the moor on snow-shoes to carry him out.
Then there was Joyce Palmer, aged five. She left home at 7.30 each morning and walked two miles down a slope of one in four, then up a track steeper than Sutton Bank. She was home again in near darkness. Her parents, with four daughters under six, had meant to leave the dale. The new road, they said, would be like “a lifeline into the outside world”. Mrs. Palmer added that a bath and hot water would make life a great deal easier. Modest wishes, by modern standards.
The road was built, and the farmhouses gained their improvements. A bus service had also been hoped for, but it seems it never arrived. Some promises survive the Ministry, and some do not.
- 1“Yorkshire Dale to begin new life”. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer. 27 November 1948. Page 6 ↩︎
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