Early plans to turn the dale green, Teesdale Mercury

Early plans to turn the dale green

May 14, 2008

During the 18th and 19th centuries many different people journeyed into Teesdale. Some came to explore the plant life or the geology of the dale. Others came to look with wonder on the beautiful scenery, which they then proceeded to share with others by means of their paintings or writings. 

A visitor called Arthur Young came to see Teesdale in around 1770 for none of those reasons. Young was an agriculturalist who had embraced the whole notion of the agricultural revolution with enthusiasm. He spent every penny he had modernising his farm in Hertfordshire. Then, in order to avoid financial difficulties, he began to record the progress of the new advances in farming. He travelled much in this country and also in France, Italy and Ireland persuading landowners to give him access to their estate records. Arthur Young came to Teesdale at the invitation of the Earl of Darlington and has left a detailed record of the farming practices adopted by the Raby Estates in the later years of the 18th century. He was very impressed by the way that the Earl was modernising his farming methods in line with modern theories.

Arthur Young had an almost obsessive interest in improving waste lands - and that included much of upper Teesdale and Stainmore. 

After his visit to Teesdale he published a book with the mind-boggling title of ‘Observations on the present State of the Waste Lands of Great Britain'. It's as well that some of his more ‘progressive' ideas haven't been adopted. 

He thought that the whole of Stainmore should be divided up into fields and carrots and turnips grown there. Turnips were another of his passions and he was delighted that the Earl of Darlington was growing turnips on his Raby Estate. I think, if he had been around today, Arthur Young would have been campaigning for organic farming and ways of ‘saving the planet' and writing disapprovingly of anyone who didn't share his views.

About the land between Bowes and Brough Young writes: "I continued the road to Brough - a line of 12 miles, and not more than three cultivated, full nine that yield no profit - scarce that of feeding sheep." 

He visited the turnpike cottage along the road and discovered that the keeper ‘raises excellent potatoes, good garden beans and admirable turnips' in his little garden that had been ‘taken in from the waste'. He continues: "It is a country that calls for industry to inclose: Fertile fields loaded with corn, and giving food to numerous herds of cattle, ought to be the prospect of this tract, not whins, fern, ling and other trumpery! Shame to the possessors!"  Do you think he was right? For myself I can't quite see Stainmore covered with corn instead of heather but I could be wrong. In medieval times cereal crops were grown around Spital on Stainmore so you never know.

Writing about the country to the north and west of Middleton - presumably the high fells dividing Teesdale from Weardale Arthur Young is equally optimistic. He refers to these ‘vast tracts of moors covered, some with ling; and others with a wild grass, called white earth, greatly susceptible of improvement' - ‘capable of being converted into good grass fields. The vast benefit of improving is manifest. The turnips they get the first year were generally reckoned to pay for paring, burning and liming'. So there you are! upper Teesdale could be transformed after two or three years into a vast market garden.

It's not as if Arthur Young didn't see the beauties of Teesdale as he continued with his crusade. In fact he waxes lyrical when he visits places like High Force. He describes how he climbed to the bottom of the fall. "Making use of our hands as well as feet and descending almost like parrots, we crawled from rock to rock, and reached from bough to bough, till we got to the bottom of this noble fall. The whole scene is gloriously romantic for on every side it is walled in with pendant rocks an hundred feet high." 

He was particularly taken with Dirt Pit lying to the north east of High Force. He called it: "One of the most exquisite bird's-eye landscapes in the world. It is a small, deep sequestered vale, containing a few inclosures of a charming verdure, finely opposed by the blackness of the surrounding mountains."

I think Arthur Young was really taken with Teesdale. Commenting on the 18 miles from Barnard Castle to High Force, he writes: "I never travelled a line of country so astonishingly fine, containing so noble a variety. - A glorious range of mountains, valleys, beautiful inclosures, hanging woods, precipices, torrents, rocks, streams and cascades. A morning's ride well worth a journey of a thousand miles to travel."

Arthur Young was a strange mixture wasn't he? Do you think he really thought Teesdale would be improved by inclosing the moors and planting them with turnips and carrots?

First published in the Mercury, May 7, 2008