- The Line the Drove Makes
- The Shepherd’s Year, and Why It Is Short
- Things That Hold Their Place, and Things That Do Not
- The Folds, the Bields, and the Bell
- The Fell Settlements, and the Terms They Keep
- Crossing the Wold, and What It Costs
“Below the drove a man owns his grazing and argues about the boundary. Above it he borrows the grazing and argues about nothing, because there is nobody to argue with and the ground does not take an interest in his opinion. Everything the high country does differently follows from that.”
The Line the Drove Makes
“I can show you the line on a clear day from the church tower. Above it the walls stop, the hedges stop, the field names stop, and the last thing anybody built is a fold with no roof. That is not the edge of the parish. The parish goes up another four miles on paper.”
The drove road along the shoulder of the High Wold is not a boundary and has never been described as one in any roll, and yet every practical thing in the upland changes when it is crossed. Below the drove the ground is held in the ordinary way, with walls, field names, tithe obligations and a bailiff who can say whose beast is whose. Above it the ground is grazed by custom, in common, under arrangements that no court has ever been asked to rule upon and that the graziers themselves would find difficult to write down.
The line is legible from a distance because building stops at it. Walls run up the slope and end, sometimes in the middle of a field, at the point where the labour of maintaining them ceased to be worth the grazing they enclosed. Above that, what stands is not building but shelter: roofless folds, a hut of turf over stone, a shepherd’s bield in the lee of an outcrop with a hearth and no door. The distinction matters to a traveller because a roofless fold means the ground below it is used and the ground above it is passed through.
What the parish claims on paper goes considerably higher than what the parish keeps. Harrowgate priory holds the wold as far as the watershed and the bounding of chapter eight walks only as far as the third stone above the drove, which stands four miles short of it. The gap is not a dispute. Nobody contests the claim. Nobody walks it. Both facts have been true together for as long as the book records, which makes the wold the clearest case in the march of ground held without being kept.
Graziers speak of the upland as lent rather than owned, and the usage is worth noticing because it is not humility. A man who says he has the summer grazing at Thwaite Head means that he has it this year, that he had it last year, that his father had it, and that he will lose it the first season he fails to go up. The custom is entirely a custom of use. There is no rent, no entry in the manor roll, no document of any kind, and the only proof of right is that the sheep were there and somebody watched them.
The consequence for anybody travelling above the drove is that the ordinary machinery of the realm thins out very quickly. There is no constable above the line, the nearest justice is at Harrowgate, and a man robbed at the shieling will be advised to walk down and report it rather than expect anybody to walk up. What replaces that machinery is the graziers themselves, who are few, who know each other, and who deal with trouble in the high country by methods that the assize prefers not to enquire into closely.
None of this makes the upland lawless in the way a southern reader expects. It is heavily governed, but governed by a body of practice rather than by an institution: which slopes are grazed in which month, which ground is left standing, whose flock goes first to water, what is done when a beast is found dead, and what is never done at all. A stranger who breaks that practice will be corrected quickly and civilly on the first occasion, and on the second he will find that nobody will sell him anything.
The drove is also where the observances stop, and this is the clearest single fact about the line. Below it the parish rings, walks its bound, and buries its dead in consecrated ground within the week. Above it there is a bell at every fold, a stone at certain places, and nothing whatever that the parish would describe as a rite. A grazier asked what is done above the drove will say that the fold bell is done and will not add to the list, and the list does not need adding to.
The Shepherd’s Year, and Why It Is Short
“Five months and a fortnight, and I have known the fortnight taken back. Everything the flock must do and everything I must do goes inside that, so when a gentleman asks why we do not spend a week looking into some matter on the tops, the answer is that a week is a fortieth of the whole year I have up there.”
The upland year opens when the snow leaves the north slopes and closes when the first serious weather comes off the watershed, and between those two the graziers reckon on five months. It is the shortest working year in the march and it governs everything else about the high country, including a good deal that visitors attribute to temperament. Upland people are abrupt with strangers in June for the same reason a harvest village is abrupt in August.
The flock goes up in stages rather than at once, and the staging is the part that most repays attention. The wethers go first, because they are expendable in a way the breeding ewes are not, and because a week of wethers on new ground tells a shepherd whether the ground is right. If they scatter, if they will not settle, if they come down on their own, the ewes do not go up at all that season and the reason is entered in nobody’s book. It is simply known in the dale that Rigg Head was not taken this year.
Lambing happens below the drove and is the reason the calendar cannot move. A ewe lambs on the low ground in the worst of the spring, and the lambs must be strong enough to walk the drove before the grass on the tops is worth having. Push it early and the lambs do not arrive; leave it late and the summer is wasted. Every other upland obligation in the march is fitted around those two fixed points, including the bounding, the musters and the courts, which is why the Harrowgate assize sits when it does.
The clip is the one moment when the high country is crowded, and it is worth a traveller arranging to see. Flocks come down to the washfolds within a few days of each other and the dale fills with more people than it holds at any other season. A great deal of business that has nothing to do with wool is settled while it lasts: marriages arranged, disputes heard without a court, debts paid in kind, and the shared arrangements for the following year agreed between men who will not all meet again before the next clip.
Then the ground empties, and the emptying is abrupt. Within a fortnight of the flocks coming down the upland is as unvisited as it was in March, and it stays so for six months. Nothing is maintained in that time. A wall that falls in October is found fallen in April, a shieling roof that goes stays gone, and a track that slips is not walked again until somebody needs it. The long winter absence is the single largest cause of lapse in the high country, and the graziers know it perfectly well.
The upland closes its season with labour that returns nothing measurable. Before the flock comes down, the shepherds set the grazing stones straight, check the fold bells, walk the bields and then go upward once more instead of down. At the last fold they ring the bell and leave it hanging through the winter. No priest attends and no doctrine is offered. A shepherd asked why will say that the ground should hear somebody before it hears nothing for half a year, and no grazier has proposed saving four days by discovering whether the practice matters.
The clip is also the upland’s social season and nobody there pretends otherwise. Ale comes up from Harrowgate with the buyers, pedlars spread cloth and small iron on boards beside the washfolds, fiddlers appear without being hired, and young men who have spent five months seeing the same three faces suddenly discover reasons to remain below the fold after the day’s work. Wrestling, dog trials and wagers on fleece weight are ordinary enough that the older graziers complain about them every year and budget for the lost morning every year as well. Courtship is practical and public. A family notices who worked through rain, who settled a frightened flock, who drank past sense and who was still useful when the buyer’s cart broke an axle.
Winter produces the opposite social world. The high farms do not become silent households merely because the hill is shut. Visiting runs along the lower lanes when weather allows; spinning, leather work, mending and account keeping become reasons for three households to sit in one room; old songs and longer stories belong to this half of the year because nobody in June has time for either. Marriages agreed at the clip are often made in the dark half, when the people who will actually have to lend carts, beds and food can attend. Prosperity on the wold is measured less by display than by reserve: fodder left in March, wool not pledged before clipping, a roof repaired before the first storm, and enough younger hands that an old man can be spared from the night watch.
Things That Hold Their Place, and Things That Do Not
“The scholar asks me what it is. I do not know and I have never needed to. I ask three questions. Does it breed true, does it keep to its ground, and can it be turned from the lambing. Three yeses and it is a beast. One no and it is something else, and what the something else is called can be settled by better men than me.”
The upland has a test for what it is dealing with and the test has nothing to do with what a thing looks like. It asks whether the thing breeds true, whether it keeps to its own ground, and whether it can be warned off the lambing. A creature that does all three is a beast, however unpleasant, and is dealt with by the ordinary means of shepherding. A creature that fails one of the three is not, and the shepherds have a different set of practices for it, which begin with not being there.
The test is practical and it is also, by accident, a good deal more accurate than the learned classifications. A wolf that has taken to a corrupted belt still breeds true and still keeps a range, so it is handled as a wolf, with dogs, lamps, and a bounty at Harrowgate. Something that has ceased to hold a range, that is found forty miles from where it was found last, is not handled at all. The graziers move the flock and wait, and the waiting is measured in seasons rather than weeks.
The upland is honest that the second category breeds. This surprises visitors who expect the unnatural to be sterile, and the marcher answer is unsentimental. A lineage on the fells that has gone wrong stays wrong. Its young are wrong in the same way, and after four or five generations there is a population rather than an incident. The graziers can name the belts where this has happened, they can date some of them, and they can say which valleys were clear within living memory and are not now.
What they cannot say is why one lineage turns and the one in the next valley does not. The learned explanation is that the ground itself is corrupted and the beasts take it up over generations, which the shepherds accept without much interest, since it does not change what they do. The practical explanation they offer instead is a list of the belts to avoid, with the dates of the last trouble in each, and that list is worth considerably more to a company than any theory of causes.
The word for it in the dales is turned, and a stranger should be ready for the district to use that word twice in one sentence without hearing any difficulty in it. Stock that has gone over is turned stock. The first sign of it in a fold is a sour lamb, which is a thing one finds rather than a thing one names. And to turn a beast is also to drive it off the pasture, which is the other half of the upland’s whole practice. Nobody here has ever confused the two, and no one has ever thought to distinguish them.
The learned have their own words and the dales know them without using them. The Collegium writes of a degenerate lineage, calls the working unit a strain, and attaches the strain to a place, so that a man may read of the Gant strain in a survey and recognise the belt his grandfather kept sheep off. The process it calls declension. The parish clergy preach about the marred and write vitiate stock in the visitation return. A grazier asked about any of this will agree that it sounds right and will then tell you which belts to avoid.
Turning is the whole of upland practice and it deserves to be understood properly. A shepherd does not kill what comes onto his ground, because killing is expensive, dangerous, and in the second category frequently ineffective. He turns it: moves the flock, lights the fold, works the dogs at the edge of the ground rather than at the thing, and makes his own pasture the least convenient place for it to be. The whole art is to be unrewarding rather than to be victorious.
The bounty at Harrowgate is therefore taken up less often than the priory expects, and the priory has never quite understood why. It offers money for a head and receives few, and concludes that the fells are quieter than the reports suggest. The graziers read the same fact the other way round. A bounty rewards a man for going to a thing, and going to a thing is the error that kills shepherds, so the money sits unclaimed in a district that would otherwise be glad of it.
The barrows are the exception to the whole of upland practice and are handled by a rule of their own, which is that nothing is handled at all. A flock is moved off and is not brought back that season. The dogs are not worked near them. No bell is rung at a barrow and the omission is deliberate, since ringing is what the upland does everywhere else and the graziers are quite clear that it is not done there. Whatever the ordinary practice is thought to achieve, the upland does not want it achieved on that ground.
The Folds, the Bields, and the Bell
“There is a bell at every fold above the drove and I have never met a man who would say plainly what it is for. Sheep, says one. The weather, says another. A third told me it was for me, and would not say more, and I have thought about that answer for eleven years.”
The built things of the high country are three and they are easy to tell apart. A fold is a walled enclosure without a roof, used to gather and hold a flock, and it is the only upland structure that is maintained annually. A bield is a shelter for a man, usually a stone wall in the lee of an outcrop with a hearth and a turf roof, and it is maintained when somebody happens to need it. A shieling is a hut lived in for the season, and there are fewer of these each decade as the graziers move to working the tops from below.
Every fold above the drove carries a bell, hung in the wall at the gate, and the practice is universal in the march and unexplained in any document. The bells are small, they are not consecrated, and no chapter has ever taken an interest in them. They are hung by the graziers at their own cost, they are replaced when they crack, and a fold whose bell has gone missing is reported in the dale in the tone a southern parish would use for a broken church window.
The answers given for the bell are inconsistent and the inconsistency is itself informative. It gathers the sheep, which is true and would not require it to be hung at the gate of an empty fold all winter. It warns of weather, which is not true. It tells another shepherd where you are, which is true and is the answer most often given to strangers. The oldest graziers give a fourth answer, which is that the ground is used to it, and offer nothing further.
What is certain is that the bells are rung at fixed moments rather than at need. They are rung when the flock goes up, when it comes down, at the walking of the ground on the last day, and whenever a shepherd enters a fold he has not entered that season. That last is the one to remember. A man coming to a fold after an absence rings before he goes in, every time, and will do it in full daylight with nothing whatever visible for three miles.
The practice extends to travellers by invitation and is not optional in spirit. A company sheltering at an upland fold will be told to ring on arrival, and the telling is done in the manner of a man passing on a small courtesy rather than a warning. Refusing is not dangerous in any way anybody can demonstrate. It is simply noticed, and the noticing follows a party down the dale faster than the party itself travels.
A traveller who wants the upland to deal with him should adopt the bell and ask nothing about it. The graziers are entirely willing to discuss grazing rights, weather, prices, the state of the drove, the assize and their opinion of the priory, and they will discuss the ground itself at some length. The bell is the one subject on which the answer is always slightly different and never quite complete, and pressing it is the single fastest way to stop a useful conversation.
One further thing about the bells is worth a traveller’s attention because it is the only part of the practice anybody will volunteer. A bell taken from a ruined fold is never hung at another one. It goes to the parish below, is kept in the church, and is not used. There are eleven such bells at the two upland churches, each with a fold named against it in the churchwarden’s book, and the entries run back further than any other series in the district.
The Fell Settlements, and the Terms They Keep
“They are better neighbours than the village in the valley and worse regarded. They pay what they owe, they keep the days, they have never once failed to come out when the bell went, and I have buried nine of their children in ground the valley would not give them. I say what I think of that in the pulpit and I am not thanked for it.”
There are settlements above the drove that are not grazier settlements, and a traveller in the march will meet them within a week. They are small, they are old, they sit on ground nobody else has wanted, and they are inhabited by families whom the valley describes as afflicted and who do not, in the main, describe themselves that way. The march is direct about their existence and evasive about their standing, and both habits are worth understanding before a company arrives among them.
What is said of them in the valley is the usual thing said everywhere in the realm, that the mark descends, that the blood is bad, and that proximity is unwise. What is done in the march is different from what is said, because the upland is short of people and cannot afford the valley’s convictions at full strength. Fell families are hired for the clip, bought from at the Harrowgate market with no more than the ordinary haggling, and relied upon for work at the edges of ground that the dale would rather not do itself.
They are also, and this is stated plainly by everybody who deals with them, better at the observances than the clean villages below. The offerings are kept on the days they fall. The bells are rung without anybody needing to be reminded. The boundaries of the bad ground are walked by the fell settlements in years when the parish below has let its own walking lapse. Whether this is piety, caution, or the practice of people who cannot afford a mistake is disputed in the march and settled nowhere.
The disputed question is what follows from it. One reading, common among the graziers, is the simple one: they keep the terms because they live closer to the ground that requires them. Another, heard in the valley and never in the fell settlements themselves, holds that they are tolerated up there for reasons that a clean family would not be. That reading carries a great deal of fear and no evidence whatever. A third, offered by two of the older curates, is that the question is impious and that the answer is that they are neighbours.
The law in the march is the law everywhere and the march applies it lightly. Permits exist and are not asked for above the drove. Exclusion is enforced at Harrowgate on market days and nowhere else. The priory’s position, given in writing two decades ago and never revised, is that the fell settlements lie within the parish, are entitled to its ministry, and are to be buried in consecrated ground on the same terms as any other household. It has been unpopular ever since and it has not moved.
A company crossing the upland will be dealt with by these settlements fairly, cautiously, and at a certain distance, which is a reasonable response to strangers from people who have reason to be careful of them. The practical advice given by every warden in the march is short. Pay what is asked. Do not ask to see anybody’s hands. If a fell family tells you not to go up a particular ghyll, that is the best information you will get in the district and it was expensive for them to give you.
What the terms consist of is known in outline and is not discussed in the valley. Something is kept, at a place, on a day, by somebody whose family does it. The fell settlements perform it without apology or display, and they perform the parish observances as well, more exactly than the valley does. The two are not felt by them to be in competition, which is precisely what the clergy find hardest about the arrangement and what the graziers find least remarkable.
What the valley is saying, when it says that the mark descends and the blood is bad, is what the realm elsewhere says about the Afflicted, and it is worth naming the parallel because it governs how these people are treated in law. The march applies the realm’s usual disabilities lightly and inconsistently, the fell settlements do not petition against them, and no incumbent in the record has certified anybody either way. A company from the south will find the whole arrangement more familiar than it expects and a good deal less enforced.
Crossing the Wold, and What It Costs
“Twenty-two miles and no shelter but what you find. In June it is the finest walking in the north and in October it has killed men who knew it. I have never lost anybody crossing. I have lost two who decided, halfway, that they knew a shorter way down.”
The crossing of the High Wold from Thwaite Head to the Gant road is twenty-two miles of open ground with no settlement upon it, and it is the most travelled upland route in the march because every alternative is longer. It is a drove road in the proper sense, maintained by use rather than by obligation, marked where marking was cheap and unmarked where it was not, and holding the status of a backway rather than a lantern road for the plain reason that nobody owes it anything.
The marking is worth describing because a traveller will depend on it. Cairns stand at the crossings of the ghylls and at the four points where the route changes direction, and they are built up by whoever passes, so their size is a rough measure of how much the road is used. Between the cairns there is nothing. In clear weather the line is obvious from the ground itself, in cloud it is not obvious at all, and the eight hours between the third and fourth cairns are where the crossing kills people.
The costs of the crossing are borne differently by drovers and by everybody else. A drove pays nothing, takes four days, and stops at the folds, whose use is free to any man moving stock and charged to any man not. A company on foot will be quoted a few shillings at Thwaite Head for the use of a fold together with a guide as far as the third cairn. The guide is worth the money for the fourth section, which he will decline to walk and will describe instead.
Weather governs everything and the upland reads it by a set of signs that a stranger should simply adopt without argument. Cloud on Gant Fell before the middle of the morning means the crossing is not attempted that day. Wind from the north-east in any month means the ghylls will be running by afternoon. A still, warm day in October is the most dangerous condition on the wold, because it draws parties onto the tops in the hour before a change that the graziers can see coming and visitors cannot.
The ground off the route is where the upland keeps its trouble and the drove is laid where it is for that reason. It runs high, along the shoulder, where a lower line would be shorter and easier, and every experienced traveller in the march says the same thing about the lower line. It goes past three ghyll heads where the flocks are not taken. That it is not used is the whole of the argument against using it.
What a company should carry is settled and short. Rope, because the ghylls are crossed and not forded. Lamps, because the crossing is sometimes finished in the dark, and no sensible party camps on the tops. Bread and cheese for a day beyond the estimate, because the estimate assumes the weather. And a bell, small, of the kind sold at Harrowgate market for a few pence, which the graziers will notice a company carrying and will think better of it for.
The marking of the route carries one feature a stranger should be able to read. At four points the line of cairns bends where no ground requires it to bend, and at each of the four there is a stone set apart from the marking with nothing cut on it. Drovers say the route was laid that way. Asked why, they say that it was laid that way by men who knew the ground, which is the upland’s complete answer to that class of question and is not intended to be rude.