Shepherds' Hall

This morning I set off to walk the dogs but had to change my plan a bit because the route I had in mind was being used by the army for crouching-behind-walls practice. I think they may have been put off by two nosey terriers.

So we drove a little further and faced up to an even stronger wind. The ruin in this little copse is called - according to the map but I have never heard the locals refer to it - 'Shepherds' Hall'. The land around is pasture now but has clearly been slowly reclaimed from the moor by many years hard labour. It is fun to reconstruct the farming practices which must have required this desolate building: Dales farmers seem to keep their sheep on the moors through most of the winter, preferring to lamb later in the year than let them over-graze the prized hay meadows in the valley bottoms. It would have been hard to tend those sheep in bad weather unless you were already on the moor.

We shouldn't be nostalgic for that past. It was a hard life and while it did support a larger working population on the land, it gave them little more than poverty in the present and poverty in the future. The modern shepherd can cover 100s of acres in a morning in his 4x4, get home to see his family in the evening, and send his kids to university. That is progress.

EDIT: The archaeologist @janetedavis found me this link: Waitgate. I didn't know about that website, which is brilliant. They are right about High Waitgate: that is MoD property now and little if anything of the original building survives. It now looks like this.