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

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The major inhibiting factor for industry was a lack of suitable transport to main industrial centres. Turnpikes through the Dales were few, and the canal age touched only the southern portals at Gargrave and Skipton. The engineering determination of the Victorians served them better, as the entrepreneurial spirit pushed the railways deep into the heart of the region, along Wensleydale and into Wharfedale.

Ambitious plans conceived for links into the lesser valleys never came to fruition, although a crowning achievement was realised in 1876 in the Settle–Carlisle line. It was forced through by the Midland Railway at great financial and human cost, ironically not to serve the Dales but to compete with existing mainline routes to Scotland. For a while, the railway sustained trade along the western fringes and into Wensleydale, enabling rapid transportation of dairy products to satisfy the markets of industrial towns. But the boom was short-lived, and now only a mineral railway track and the famous Settle–Carlisle line remain, and the latter’s future was only secured in 1989, at the end of a long and hard-fought battle after it was threatened with closure in the 1980s.