A time of change for Teesdale, Teesdale Mercury

A time of change for Teesdale

Oct 2, 2007

Anyone visiting Teesdale throughout much of the 18th and 19th centuries would have noticed big changes taking place in the countryside.

The large open fields surrounding Teesdale villages were gradually being broken up and divided into smaller fields. Many of the documents relating to this process have survived. These Enclosure Awards are kept at the Durham Record Office and are like gold to local

historians and others. In the awards the fields they created were named so a search can be made for names like Kalafat or Kinninvie to find out if these names are old or are of more recent origin. And building developers and town councils can use the awards as a source of inspiration for naming new streets or blocks of flats - those that have an ounce of imagination that is. A visit to the record office could avoid the inevitable Oak Drive and Swallow Way.

As early as the 17th century a few villages divided up their fields. However ,this seemed to have happened more often where most of the land was arable - usually low land. These early enclosures were mostly by agreement of all the landowners. Those who actually worked the land - the tenant farmers - got absolutely no say in the matter. I'll bet they weren't even asked for their opinions!

In Teesdale, both Cleatlam and Whorlton had their common fields enclosed in the 17th century, Cleatlam in 1635 and Whorlton in 1677. There may have been others but these are the earliest whose awards have survived.

As the Agricultural Revolution progressed campaigners like Arthur Young, writer and secretary to the Board of Agriculture, travelled the country spreading new ideas and promoting enclosure. Arthur Young stayed at Raby Castle in the 1760s and he enthused about the improvements in agriculture he saw there. He contrasted the modern farming practices promoted by the Earl of Darlington with what he called the ‘primitive farming' that he saw over much of the rest of Teesdale.

 A bit later, in 1784, Dr George Edwards, of Barnard Castle, produced a pamphlet blaming the deplorable state of Barnard Castle Moor on its non-enclosure. He compared the moor unfavourably with Staindrop Moor that had been enclosed as early as 1765.  He wrote on the eve of the enclosure of Barnard Castle's Common Fields, which were divided up in 1785. Barnard Castle's extensive moors, covering some 6,000 acres had to wait until 1799 before enclosure.

It was easier to split up the common fields than to sort out who had ‘rights' on the village moors. As time went on though various Acts of Parliament made the whole process less complicated.

However, our moors are not the same as the lowland ‘commons' found in the south of England so it's not surprising that most of our moors were not enclosed until the middle of the 19th century.

The village fields were split along the ploughing strips. Hedges were planted or walls built marking their bounds. The resulting fields were therefore long and thin. Footpaths connected the fields and stiles were often made by simply erecting two upright gateposts close together. The hedges dividing the fields were often called cams. Higher up the dales the settlements were smaller and there were fewer farmers so the fields there were often quartered or some smaller division made. The resulting fields were in these cases roughly square.

If you look at a large-scale map you can see the many long narrow fields surrounding the villages and then the larger square fields further out from these larger settlements. And then there is the moor. This is not common land. The farmers who had rights on the moor were strictly controlled. At enclosure of the moors, stints were ‘awarded' to farmers, each stint entitling the farmer to pasture an agreed number of animals on the moor. Mostly it was those who farmed land adjacent to the moor that were allocated stints - villagers lost their rights to pasture their animals on the moor. Various charities acquired ‘allotments' on the moor. These were fenced off areas of moorland usually with access from the village by road. In a small way they helped some of the very poorest villagers to keep their independence.

So were the enclosures good for Teesdale? Well at least they gave us our marvellous stone-walls and our patchwork of fields. The quality of the livestock was improved as well. And of course local historians reap the benefit of all the resulting maps and records!

What did we lose? The Galloway ponies that had grazed on the moors for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years disappeared from the dale. Where did they go? The ponies left along with the cows and the geese and our moors became the preserve of sheep - and the grouse of course.  Something was lost as well when villagers stopped farming their land communally. - And slowly and gradually people in the villages stopped having any land and became divorced from agriculture altogether. A number of villagers left for the New World and others found work away from the dale. Nowadays villages are full of commuters.

The biggest effect of the enclosures

was that almost inevitably, many of therich got richer and the poor became poorer. Was enclosure worth it in the long run? What do you think?

First published in the Mercury, September 26, 2007