#168: Mardale – Flooding of a valley

Countrystride

This episode of Country Stride explores the history and flooding of Mardale valley in Cumbria's Far Eastern Fells. Hosts Mark Richards and an unnamed co-host join local

Key takeaways

• Jean Scott-Smith details how Mardale was settled by Scandinavian descendants who established farms like Measend, Welter, and Chapel Hill, with agricultural output including 30 hundredweight of butter weekly shipped to Manchester by 1865.
• The valley's depopulation was driven by the Hawes Water Act of 1919, which allowed Manchester Corporation to acquire the catchment area from the Earl of Lonsdale without meaningful local opposition due to the valley's isolation and single landownership structure.

Main topics

• Mardale valley history and geography
• Haweswater reservoir flooding (1930s)

Notable quotes

"What will Mardale be in the year 1954? ... Would we rather see these intrusions on our ancestral simplicity, all lapse, like Swindale, into an uninhabited solitude."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a vivid, emotionally resonant understanding of how infrastructure development erased a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:28) Hello and welcome to Country Stride, the podcast dedicated to the landscapes, people and heritage of Cumbria and the Lake District. The long summer has finally broken. I'm standing in driving rain in Haweswater with author and illustrator and our guide for today's walk, Mark Richards. Hello, Mark. How are you doing? Speaker 3 (0:50) Soaking up the mistiness, moisturising my face remarkably after all the sunny weather we've had. Haweswater, our Mardale. is very damp. Speaker 1 (0:59) It is that, isn't it? Now, we've been here a few times before, various podcasts here. We love it here, don't we? This is one of the most remote dales, really, in the Lake District, isn't it, with a remarkable history. We've talked about Wild Horsewater with Lee Schofield, had a lovely walk on that occasion. We've walked with your friend, I think, Mark Phil Tinning. That was a long time ago, talking about... mountain craft i remember having a good time on that walk and we've also been near about here with alan cleaver and a good friend of the podcast gene scott smith the great dialect speaker the valley of course flooded in the 1930s it's got my favorite hotel in it mark the horswalt hotel beautiful art deco building and i think wainwright did a A recording there, didn't he, a long time ago? He did indeed, and it's famous for his red squirrels. Very true. Great little spot to see them overlooking the reservoir there. But we're not here to talk about any of those things today. We're here for a different story, Mark. What are we talking about today, and who is our guest? Well, we're going Speaker 3 (2:07) to look at the arrival of the reservoir, the community before, but certainly what occurred when Hawes Water drowned the valley and changed this setting totally and created a wonderful, wild setting. Our guest today is the inimitable Jean Scott Smith of Shapp, who has a great love of the broader setting of her community of Shapp and this valley and Swindale and Wetsleddle and so forth. and her love of dialect is renowned. Speaker 1 (2:36) Absolutely right, yeah. So we will rewind time to before the waters rose on this valley. The communities of Mardale here, of Measend, at the other end of the valley. We'll talk about what life was like here, the shepherd's meats, the rowdy events that took place at the Dun Bull pub, and all these lost places. There's an amazing vicar there who was something of an eccentric. And then we'll talk about that process, as you say, Manchester Corporation. coming along to the valley here. Thirlmere by this stage of course has been created and Manchester need yet more water so we'll talk about what happened about the loss of this community and about the valley now as well. And one remarkable thing and partly why we're doing the podcast now Mark is if we look over the wall now in front of us because it's been such a dry summer we can see some of the remains of some of the lost buildings, the original road. It's absolutely incredible, and we'll get on to that when we come back here with Jean in a little while. For now, we're going to head updale to Shapp itself, I think to the church, to meet Jean. And the other thing to say, if you're one of the listeners who don't stay and listen to our little end piece when the podcast proper ends, do hang around today because we've got some amazing autumn Country Stride live events. So we'll talk about them at the end. But for now, let's head back east to Shapp and... Meet Jean Scott Smith. Speaker 3 (4:32) Well, we found some kind of shelter on a really wretched day inside the parish church of St Michael's. And I'm in the company, the delightful company of Jean Scott Smith. And it's a delight to be with you again, Jean. Can you remind listeners your association with this setting? Speaker 2 (4:49) Thank you, Mark. Yes, this is my family church. And I've had family, my father's family have been in the parish for over 500 years, so this would be, or its predecessor would be the church that they attended. And I'm a church warden today. Speaker 3 (5:05) You've got a great affection for the history of the area. Are you involved with the History Society here? Speaker 2 (5:11) Yes, I am. Speaker 3 (5:13) We started today at Haweswater. For the very few listeners who have perhaps not had the good fortune of discovering Haweswater and Marvell, Perhaps you could give us a geography of the setting. Speaker 2 (5:25) Well, if you go by Alfred Wainwright's books, what he calls the Far Eastern Fells, they are the fells with High Street, Hartfell, and Hawes Water is the valley, the reservoir now, but it was a natural lake, and that valley is just to the east of that range of fells. Why is it called Marvell? Speaker 3 (5:45) Is that to do with a mere? A Speaker 2 (5:47) mere, yes. A mere is a lake. And it's a deal with a mere. Scandinavian words. Absolutely. Speaker 3 (5:53) It's no mere like now. Digging deep into history, who were the first settlers here? Speaker 2 (6:01) Well, there must have been people in the Bronze Age because there are some standing stones around. But then we do know that there's a British fort on the top of Castle Craig and the Romans. had a road that went over High Street. Why it's called High Street. After that, we get people of Scandinavian descent that came into the valley and made little settlements like at Measend and Welter and Mardale Green. In 1208, we have the home legend, which is Hugh de Holm, who was involved in the Canterbury Conspiracy in 1208 with King John, and he fled north. He came upon Mardale and hid in the cave of Wrigandale, still marked as Hugh's Cave on the Ordnance Survey maps. And it's however unlikely that he would have come dressed in any finery because he was an outlaw seeking refuge. He settled and eventually became accepted in the valley. He was believed to have built... a farm called Brackenthwaite, Bowdathwaite, sorry, at the foot of Wrigandale, and it would have been somewhere he could have bolted back to his cave should anyone come looking for him. But his family eventually built Chapel Hill opposite the church, a big farm, and one named Rudolphus is reputed to have founded an oratory in Mardale in 1350, a religious building where you can hear services. It would be under the auspices of the abbey, so one of the canons would come and take services there. Speaker 3 (7:35) So there's a long evidence of agricultural activity, and this is a valley that's been quiet and settled for literally centuries. It Speaker 2 (7:45) was, yes, a farming community. Not just sheep up on the fells, but cattle in the valley. Because actually if we go to 1865, Harriet Martineau stated 30 hundred weight of butter a week was collected from farms in Mardale by carrier's wagon to go to Shapps Station and thence to Manchester and other cities. Other sources say 3,000 pounds. Dunball Visitor's Book records butter and milk dealers from places like Sheffield visiting on an annual basis. They would go around the local farms and make deals with them to collect their produce and take it onwards. It shows what good grazing land there was actually at the valley head. Speaker 3 (8:31) The access to the area, because it looks today, it's a landlocked valley in a sense. It's one way in, one way out. But historically, people came over the passes. From Speaker 2 (8:41) the south they did. They came over Gatesgarth Pass out of Longsleddle, Nanbale Pass out of Kentmere. The two converge at the head of the valley. The road actually then goes down the west side of the Natural Lake and on to Bampton. There was no pass coming out of Wrigandale. There's no pass at the head of there. So it wasn't really out in the sticks. It would have peddlers and drovers. pack horsemen and all sorts coming through. They'd be quite busy probably. Can Speaker 3 (9:14) we paint a picture of what this particular valley looked like before the flood? It was very green, hence Mardale Green, and it had its natural lake, the Mere, and there was a farming community with scattered farmsteads, but there was a little cohesion around Mardale Green itself. Was there any other settlement in the valley? Speaker 2 (9:36) Yes, there was. Maison was the one down towards the foot of the lake, and that was where there was a grammar school. that had been founded. The masoned falls had brought down soil over millennia and formed like a delta that almost cut the lake in half. So there was low water below masoned and then there was high water going up to the Dale Head. As I said, there were a number of farms. That was a little community in its own right, was masoned. And then you're going a little bit further up that road and you came to another settlement called Huelta. And there was a number of farms there. And after the Measland School had closed, they built a new school, and they called that Measland Mardale School. It didn't close until the 1930s. But it also had a room that was used as a community hall where they used to have gatherings. Speaker 3 (10:33) So if you go further up the valley towards Wrigandale, we come upon the church. Speaker 2 (10:38) Once you crossed over the beck, you were into Shapp Parish. And then you got the church, and across the road was Chapel Hill Farm. And the church itself was Holy Trinity. This was a follow-on from the oratory. It had a tower just 28 feet high, and it was virtually overwhelmed by the yew trees. Speaker 3 (11:01) Those yew trees must have been quite ancient. Speaker 2 (11:04) Yes. Well, legend says that they were planted for the arches, the Kendall arches, who were very famous. They were at Agincourt and such like. Yew trees in a churchyard are commonplace because they're one of the trees that are evergreen and they also restore themselves. If they become damaged, they'll start to grow again. They revive themselves. Speaker 3 (11:25) That's true. The borodell yews. Speaker 2 (11:27) Middle will die and then new shoots will come from around the outside. Speaker 3 (11:34) Do we know anything about the church and its church life? Speaker 2 (11:38) Yes, they'd had a number of vicars. They always had a vicar. And often that vicar's role included being master of measant grammar school. So they were usually men of learning. And they taught, in the grammar school, they taught Greek and Latin classics to farm boys. A Speaker 3 (11:57) bit like Hawkshead Grammar School then. Yes, Speaker 2 (11:59) and Bampton did the same. They used to say that the ploughmen drove horses in Latin. We had one vicar who was called Boustead and he had a habit of taking his tortoiseshell lancet to church and the congregation would ask him to bleed them in the arm in the spring and he'd take them out onto Wood Howe and he wouldn't be allowed today but he was quite a character. The church itself, quite small, it had a gallery at the West End, which had a date of 1700 and something on it. The sanctuary area was semicircular. The altar table was semicircular. So you were all gathered around God's table. And the windows were all uncoloured. They were just plain glass. So we were looking out on God's handiwork. It was a lovely church, boxed pews and, you know. The last proper vicar that they had would be Reverend Barham, who was there in the 1920s into the 1930s. A single man, and he dressed in quite Quakerish dress, and he lived all on his own in that big vicarage without a housekeeper. He was great friends with a family, a clergy family, that used to spend all their holidays in the valley. And he would lend them a gramophone and some records to amuse themselves. But he also bought a gramophone and gramophone records that had hymns on them so that if there was a very small congregation and no organist, he could play the tunes and people could join in the hymns. I Speaker 3 (13:39) gather this led to some hijinks. Speaker 2 (13:42) Yes, some youths had managed to get into the church, discovered the gramophone and the records and thought it would be quite fun to steam off the stickers, the labels, and stick them on other gramophone records which they left. And poor Mr. Bowram, when he put it on, it played, will you stop your tickling joke? Quite harmless, really. But really his idea of having a gramophone in the church with records was very sensible. Speaker 3 (14:12) Across the road from the church was the home of the kings of Mardale. What was his family? They Speaker 2 (14:18) were the Holme family. H-O Speaker 1 (14:20) -L-M Speaker 2 (14:21) -E. Yes. And this was Hugh de Holme that had fled into Mardale back in the 13th century. And it