Читать книгу Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: North and East. Howgills, Mallerstang, Swaledale, Wensleydale, Coverdale and Nidderdale онлайн

25 страница из 59

All these activities have long since finished, but not so the extensive stone quarries around Horton in Ribblesdale and at Linton, which serve the chemical industry and provide aggregate for building, roads and railways. Sadly, these massive workings are a scar on the landscape, a far cry from the earlier, small-scale operations that produced stone for local building and walling, and to produce lime fertiliser. At first glance, these old, abandoned workings are now barely distinguishable from their natural backdrop, something their modern-day equivalents might find harder to achieve once they have been worked out.

Any other enterprise that developed was only ever on a limited scale. Fast-flowing streams in the main valleys powered grist and, later, other mills, with textiles becoming significant in some corners, such as Grassington and Aysgarth. Just as important was the widespread cottage textile industry, carried out in individual farms and cottages, not least to the northwest, where gloves and stockings fell off clattering needles, wielded by woman, child and man alike, in such prodigious quantities that these people become known as ‘the terrible knitters of Dent’.