Читать книгу Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: South and West. Wharfedale, Littondale, Malhamdale, Dentdale and Ribblesdale онлайн

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What other enterprise 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 in the north west where gloves and stockings fell off clattering needles wielded by woman, child and man alike in such prodigious quantities that they become known as ‘terrible knitters of Dent’.

18th-century lime kiln at Braida Garth (Walk 43)

The major inhibiting factor to industry was a lack of suitable transport to the 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 their 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 that won only in 1989 at the end of a long and hard-fought battle after it too was threatened with closure in the 1980s.