Yorkshire moors

“ I am a man of resolution, and finding that the vision only aggravated matters, I beat the veal cutlets down; yet, when they vanished, a new phantom rose to distress me. During the day I had examined on the slopes of Coska, Fountains, and Penigent several of those curious pots which are peculiar to the Yorkshire limestone moors. These pots, as they are called, are natural wells, hideous circular gaping holes opening perpendicularly into the bowels of the mountain. In rainy weather the tiny rills which descend the fells precipitate themselves into these black gulfs and disappear. ”

“ In their earliest walks, the five little girls with their one brother—all of them under seven years—directed their steps towards the wild moors above their home rather than into the village. Over a century has passed, and practically no change has come to the moorland side of the house, so that we can imagine the precocious toddling children going hand-in-hand over the grass-lands towards the moors beyond, as though we had travelled back over the intervening years. ”

“ These animals are the descendants of some Perthshire Hares which were turned down near Greenfield, Yorkshire, about twenty years ago, and which have increased in numbers, and have spread over a large tract of moorland in Yorkshire, Cheshire, and Derbyshire. In the North of Scotland the moors are snow-covered much later than is usually the case in Cheshire, and the white dress would be a distinct advantage to the Hares, but on the milder bare slopes of these English moors it only tends to make them conspicuous. ”

“ The softer rocks below generally take a gentle slope from the base of the hard gritstone to the river-side pastures below. At the edges of the dales, where waterfalls pour over the wall of limestone—as at Hardraw Scar, near Hawes—the action of water is plainly demonstrated, for one can see the rapidity with which the shale crumbles, leaving the harder rocks overhanging above.
Unlike the moors of the north-eastern parts of Yorkshire, the fells are not prolific in heather. It is possible to pass through Wensleydale—or, indeed, most of the dales—without seeing any heather at all. ”

“ Generally, in all the north of England, the diluvial gravel has been transported by the same routes or the same points of origin as the boulders; but there is some variety in this respect worthy of notice. On the eastern side of the island, from the Tyne to the Humber, the gravelly deposits appear partly of local and partly of distant origin. On the Yorkshire coast, local gravel, derived from the chalk wolds or oolitic moors, lies in very irregular beds, distinct altogether from the clays full of pebbles brought from the Cumbrian and Penine mountains ”

“ Even on land recently enclosed, and where arrow-heads and worked flints may exist in abundance, unless some unusual inducement is offered, they remain unnoticed by the farm-labourers; and it is only owing to the diligence of local collectors that such numbers have been found on the Yorkshire Wolds, the Derbyshire Moors, and in parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Suffolk. ”

“ Away to the north the road crosses the desolate country like a pale-green ribbon. It passes over Lockton High Moor, climbs to 700 feet at Tom Cross Rigg, and then disappears into the valley of Eller Beck, on Goathland Moor, coming into view again as it climbs steadily up to Sleights Moor, nearly 1,000 feet above the sea. An enormous stretch of moorland spreads itself out towards the west. ”

“ The Early British inhabitants were more inclined to the hill-tops than the hollows, if the innumerable indications of their settlements be any guide, and there is every reason for believing that many of the hollows in the folds of the heathery moorlands were rarely visited by man. Thus, the suggestion has been made that a few of the last representatives of now extinct monsters may have survived in these wild retreats, for how otherwise do we find persistent stories in these parts of Yorkshire, handed down we cannot tell how many centuries, of strange creatures described as 'worms'? ”

“ There are all degrees of bad management, and what we have to do is to go to the moors that yielded the best at the various dates and consider what was the management that brought this about. Some of the best moors in Scotland seem to have been very poorly managed in the great year of 1872. There is Menzies Castle moor, for instance, which lies only half a dozen miles or so from the record-breaking Grandtully moor, and yet in 1872, when the latter surprised all grouse shooters, the former was said to be very badly off for grouse, and the birds killed over dogs were nearly all old ones. ”

“ Moor, fell, common, are well-known terms. Anglo-Saxon mor is waste-land, a moor, a heath; Danish mor is a moor, or morass; we have Killhope, Burnhope, and Wellhope Moors. Fell is Old Norse. All the Weardale moorlands are called fells. Chapel Fell is 2,294 feet above sea-level; A common is a tract of unenclosed pasture or outside land on which the tenantry of the inlands have a common right, or right of common for their sheep. ”

“ THE HOOTING CARN One of the grimmest yet most fascinating tracts of moorland in the West is that wild, boulder-strewn district behind St. Just in Penwith, near the Land's End. Here, amid a scene of savage beauty, wind-swept by the great gales from the Atlantic, is a stretch of treeless moor the richest in all Cornwall in remains of prehistoric man. ”

“ There is nothing there more perishable than the moor itself, or more subject to the sway of fashion than the “long and lamentable blast”. Nor is this exhilaration short-lived. It rushes us through the entire volume, without giving us time to think, without letting us lift our eyes from the page. So intense is our absorption that if some one moves in the room the movement seems to take place not there but up in Yorkshire. ”

“ With the exception of portions of Southern Perthshire say the district west of Dunkeld, embracing the Breadalbane Moors, which for many years have had comparative immunity from disease, but will have it sooner or later, the moors of Aberdeen, Banff, Inverness, Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness are attacked at pretty regular intervals, and an old and experienced hand may spot the years of disease pretty well in advance. ”

“ Nearing Kildale, the road suddenly plunged downwards to a stream flowing through a green, cultivated valley, with a lonely farm on the further slope. There was a fir-wood above this, and as I passed over the hill, among the tall, bare stems, the clouds parted a little in the west, and let a flood of golden light into the wood. Instantly the gloom seemed to disappear, and beyond the dark shoulder of moorland, where the Cook monument appeared against the glory of the sunset, there seemed to reign an all-pervading peace, the wood being quite silent, for the wind had dropped. ”

“ There is a further protrusion of granite on the Bodmin Moors, and again as far west as Scilly; while Lundy, in the Bristol Channel, belongs almost entirely to the same formation. Beneath the mire and peat, which are the decaying deposits of vegetable matter, lies a stratum of china-clay, which is worked productively to the south of the moors, and still more largely in Cornwall. The average height of the moorland is about 1500 feet, rising in places to a little over 2000. This elevation is exceeded in Wales, in the Lake District, and in Scotland ”

“ Over Dartmoor and the Bodmin moors “the old men’s workings” may be seen; hardly a gully has not been streamed, every river-bed has been turned over. The face of the moor is in places welted to such an extent that it alters the character of the scene. These workings are now grass-grown; they are very ancient, and clearly were conducted open to the sky. As the miners worked up a river-bed they built a colander behind them of rude blocks of granite, through which the stream might flow away, and many a rivulet now runs underground through these artificial passages. ”

“ In all moorland countries the ling is applied to many rural purposes; the larger stems are made into brooms, the shorter tied up into bundles that serve as brushes, while the long trailing shoots are woven into baskets. Pared up with the peat about its roots it forms a good fuel, often the only one obtainable on the drier moors. ”

“ In winter they are strong enough to make playthings of the rough lichened boulders that confront their course; and in the hottest summers they never run dry—the mother-breast of Dartmoor has always ample nourishment. Though there is a lessening in the body of the rivers, and perhaps a surface-drought of the bogs, the moors are never really parched; drovers from the Eastern counties sometimes bring their flocks hither in a summer of great heat, to feed on Dartmoor turfs when their own home-pastures would be arid. Yet the central moor is more like a desolate waste than a pasture. ”

“ Each such rosette springs in April from a buried rootstock, which, in loose loamy soil, like that of these Surrey moors, is often intricate; it burrows in and out with strange instinct among the dry sand and stones, in search of such rare moisture as it can manage to find for itself. But though water is scarce, access to light and air is easy; so the large round leaves, lying close on the bare ground, get sunshine in abundance, and feed to their hearts’ content upon their proper food—the carbon in the atmosphere—while vegetation around is still low and backward. ”

“ The following season I joined some other men for a few days' shooting over dogs on a small moor in the county of Durham, and had a few pleasant enjoyable days, getting, perhaps, thirty brace in all. At that time grouse sat very fairly well to dogs for the first ten days in the English counties, as they now do in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, but there was nothing like the quantity of birds on the English moors that there are now. One odd thing may be remarked: In all my sporting career I never shot but one curlew, and that was on this moor. Of birds, they are the wariest of the wary. ”

“ We must not be led by the term Dartmoor Forest to suppose that the moors were ever covered with woodland—certainly not within historic days; for long centuries they can only have been an almost treeless waste, with patches of trees like the surviving stunted oaks of Wistman's Wood. ”

“ Except when wrapped in snow, the high moors of the Pennine range present for eight months of the year a harmony of sober colours, in which the grey of the rocks, the bleached purple of the heather blossom and the faded yellows and browns of bent and bracken overpower the patches of green herbage. But twice in the course of the short summer the moors burst into flower and array themselves with a bravery with which no lowland meadow can compare. ”

“ But it will so happen that sometimes an enchanted Moor, with more cunning than [18] honesty, will get through one of the windows on the birth of a child, and will brand the infant with the crescent on his shoulder or arm, in which case it is well known that the child, on certain nights, will be changed into a wolf.
The enchanted Moors have their castles and palaces under the ground or beneath the rivers, and they wander about the earth, seeing but not seen; for they died unbaptized, and have, therefore, no rest in the grave. ”

“ From the tropical heat and luxuriance, the sugar-canes and the palm-trees, of the lower valleys and of the narrow plain which skirts the sea like a golden zone, it is but a step, through gardens, steep cornfields, and olive groves, to fresh Alpine pastures and woods of pine, above which vegetation expires on the rocks where snow lies long and deep, and is still found in nooks and hollows in the burning days of autumn. When thickly peopled with laborious Moors, the narrow glens, bottomed with rich soil, were terraced and irrigated with a careful industry which compensated for want of space. ”

“ Those moors that suffer the most in their disease year, like the moor in Strathspey, referred to in Season 1871, will probably afford the heaviest shooting in their good years.
Grouse, of course, have other drawbacks besides disease.
If the moors are on high ground, they are liable to have eggs frosted in late frosts, or young grouse killed by late snowstorms, as occurred in Season 1864 on Glenshee. Again, you may have a lazy, whiskey drinking keeper, who neglects vermin-killing; but, as a rule, once out of the egg, the young bird is safe. ”

“ Alum shale prevails in the cliffs for twenty-seven miles along the coast of Yorkshire, in which are found one hundred and fifty kinds of ammonites.
Besides balls of limestone, the shale abounds in fossils. It was in this—the lias—that nearly all the specimens, including the gigantic reptiles of the ancient world which we saw in the Museum at Whitby were found. Every stroke of the pick brings them out; and as the shale is soft and easily worked, they are separated without difficulty. ”

“ The present modern practice of letting moors from year to year, quite irrespective of whether from the ravages of disease there are grouse to afford shooting, and so leading to the destruction of the little breeding stock that may exist, has ruined and destroyed the reputation of many fine moors that will carry heavy stocks of birds if properly treated.
They year after year yield little or no sport, and naturally get a bad repute until they are again caught by disease and shelved for further years. ”