Now! Then! Haymaking with the Quakers of Bainbridge, Wensleydale

20 July 1858: Haymaking with the Quakers of Bainbridge, Wensleydale

Walter White. 1861. A Month in Yorkshire, 4th Ed. London: Chapman and Hall. The best of White’s travel writing, in which, as usual, he encounters and investigates the Plain People. This is the golden age of walking, when there were good roads pretty much everywhere, and they hadn’t yet been made inaccessible to pedestrians by cars. His July is told in 31 chapters, which seem to refer to the days of the month. Get it:

Excerpt

Now it was tea-time, and we had tea served after the Wensleydale manner – plain cakes and currant cakes, cakes hot and cold, and butter and cheese at discretion, with liberty to call for anything else that you like; and the more you eat and drink, the more will you rise in the esteem of your hospitable entertainers. And after that I went down to the hay-field, for it was a large field, and the farmer longed to get the hay all housed before sunset. They don’t carry hay in the dales, they “lead” it; and the two boys from Oxfordshire were not a little proud in having the “leading” assigned to them, seeing that they had nothing to do but ride the horse that drew the hay-sledge to and fro between the barn and the “wind-rows.” Another difference is, that forks are not used except to pitch the hay from the sledge to the barn, all the rest – turning the swath, making into cocks – is done with the rake and by hand. So I took a rake, and beginning at one side of the field at the same time with an old hand, worked away so stoutly, that he had much ado to keep ahead of me. And so it went on, all hands working as if there were no such thing as weariness, load after load slipping away to the barn; and I unconsciously growing meritorious. “You’re the first cockney I ever saw,” said the stalwart farmer, “that knew how to handle a rake.” Had I stayed with him a week, he would have discovered other of my capabilities equally praiseworthy. We should have accomplished the task and cleared the field; but a black cloud rose in the west, and soon sent down a heavy shower, and compelled us to huddle up the remaining rows into cocks, and leave them till morning. Must I confess it? Haymaking with the blithesome lasses in Ullrichsthal, German Bohemia, is a much more sprightly pastime than haymaking with the Quakers in Wensleydale.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

From chapter 20 of the 31 of White’s month of July, so perhaps the 20th. Ullrichsthal (Nový Oldřichov since WWII) was in German-speaking Bohemia, the theme of another of Walter White’s tours (White 1857).

Arthur ApSimon helped nearby in 1936 aged 8, presumably at the start of the school holidays in the first week of August:

I remember Yorkshire for two small boys, staying on a farm for two or three weeks. At least on one occasion my father took us up there, and he went away and worked in the week and would join us at the weekend. All the food of course was cooked in the farm kitchen. But we were supplied with a Wensleydale cheese, and this has provided a life-long template for what a farm-produced Wensleydale cheese should be like, and most of the time Wensleydale doesn’t measure up to the template. In Yorkshire they used to put Yorkshire pudding on before the meal to fill your stomach. This was when farming for the farmers in Wensleydale was with large herds of sheep, and cattle as well. The hay was cut by horse-drawn mowing machines, and labourers followed round with wooden rakes, raking up the cut grass into long ridges. I remember doing a whole day’s work like this, and being like a lobster from the sun, and I remember the various creatures that ran out before the mower, or didn’t run out and got minced up – weasels, rabbits, etc. etc., and birds… The cut hay was loaded onto sleds, which are awful for horses to draw, and packed into the stone barns which are still there – these hay barns, out in the fields. The first year that we went, 1936, we stayed at Holly House, with Mr and Mrs Kilburn, a farm on the road from Bainbridge up past Semerwater, in Semerdale. Adjacent to Holly House there’s a 25-acre field to the east of the farm, and I spent an entire day raking hay, following the hay-cutting machine. We used to collect eggs from Semerdale Hall. In 1937 we were in West Shaw Farm where there was a ford on Gayle Beck, about a mile outside Gayle. You crossed the road and walked down to the ford, and that’s where we were playing in the photo. […] [In perhaps 1935] we had a holiday in north Wales, near Capel Curig. We tended to stay in a farm called Dol-llêch on the north side of the valley. In the year after we went to [something], we stayed in a farm called Wern-y-gof-isaf, which means “the marsh of the smith lower” – isaf. Notice there that the cut hay was transported in two-wheeled carts, not on sleds. North Wales was technologically more advanced than Yorkshire (ApSimon 2019).

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Original

Four miles from Hawes down the dale is the pleasant village of Bainbridge, where the rustic houses, with flower-plots in front and roses climbing on the walls, and yellow stonecrop patching the roofs and fences, look out upon a few noble sycamores, and a green—a real village green. The hills on each side are lofty and picturesque; at one end, on a flat eminence, remains the site of a Roman camp; the Bain, a small stream coming from a lake some three miles distant, runs through the place in a bed of solid stone, to enter Ure a little below, and all around encroaching here and there up the hill-sides spread meadows of luxuriant grass. The simple rural beauty will gladden your eye, and—as with every stranger who comes to Bainbridge—win your admiration.

Wensleydale enjoys a reputation for cheese and fat pastures and wealth above the neighbouring dales, and appears to be fully aware of its superiority. The folk, moreover, consider themselves refined, advanced in civilization in comparison with the dwellers on the other side of Buttertubs: those whom we talked with yesterday. “Mr. White, if you had wanted a wife, do you think you could choose one out of Swaledale?” was the question put to me by a strapping village lass before I had been three hours in Bainbridge.

Fortune favoured me. I found here some worthy Quaker friends of mine, who had journeyed from Oxfordshire to spend the holidays under the paternal rooftree. It was almost as if I had arrived at home myself; and although I had breakfasted at Hawes, they took it for granted that I would eat a lunch to keep up my strength till dinner-time.

[The Ure, Millgill Force, Whitfell Force, the Bainbridge hornblower…]

Now it was tea-time, and we had tea served after the Wensleydale manner—plain cakes and currant cakes, cakes hot and cold, and butter and cheese at discretion, with liberty to call for anything else that you like; and the more you eat and drink, the more will you rise in the esteem of your hospitable entertainers. And after that I went down to the hay-field, for it was a large field, and the farmer longed to get the hay all housed before sunset. They don’t carry hay in the dales, they ‘lead’ it; and the two boys from Oxfordshire were not a little proud in having the ‘leading’ assigned to them, seeing that they had nothing to do but ride the horse that drew the hay-sledge to and fro between the barn and the ‘wind-rows.’ Another difference is, that forks are not used except to pitch the hay from the sledge to the barn, all the rest—turning the swath, making into cocks—is done with the rake and by hand. So I took a rake, and beginning at one side of the field at the same time with an old hand, worked away so stoutly, that he had much ado to keep ahead of me. And so it went on, all hands working as if there were no such thing as weariness, load after load slipping away to the barn; and I unconsciously growing meritorious. “You’re the first cockney I ever saw,” said the stalwart farmer, “that knew how to handle a rake.” Had I stayed with him a week, he would have discovered other of my capabilities equally praiseworthy. We should have accomplished the task and cleared the field; but a black cloud rose in the west, and soon sent down a heavy shower, and compelled us to huddle up the remaining rows into cocks, and leave them till morning.

Must I confess it? Haymaking with the blithesome lasses in Ulrichsthal is a much more sprightly pastime than haymaking with the Quakers in Wensleydale.

The hay harvest is an exciting time in the dales, for grass is the only crop, and the cattle have to be fed all through the long months of winter, and sometimes far into the backward spring. Hence every thing depends on the hay being carried and housed in good condition; and many an anxious look is cast at passing clouds and distant hill-tops to learn the signs of the weather. The dalesmen are expert in the use of the scythe; and numbers of them, after their own haymaking is over, migrate into Holderness and other grain-growing districts, and mow down the crops, even the wheat-fields, with remarkable celerity.

755 words.