Walking The Line

Stan Abbott

• Publisher: Saraband
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781915089748
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An authoritative guide to the history, landscape and lore along the scenic English train line between Settle and Carlisle, by an established travel writer and railway aficionado.

Widely known as England's most picturesque line, the enduring Settle-Carlisle Railway crosses the north Pennines between Yorkshire and Cumbria, traversing stunning scenery from the Dales through the lonely and lofty fells to the limestone pavements of Westmorland, and on into the lush, green Eden Valley.

The line was built by the Midland Railway company in the 1870s, to forge an independent route connecting its English network with Scotland. Uniquely for a railway in the UK, the entire infrastructure is a Conservation Area in its own right—comprising viaducts, stations, bridges, tunnels, trackside structures and railway workers' cottages.

11

Chapter 1

Restoration, Bad Navigation and All that Jazz

From Settle to Ribblehead

Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leav’s throng

And louch’d low grass, heaven that dost appeal

To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;

That canst but only be, but dost that long –

From ‘Ribblesdale’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins

There can be few better ways to jolt your mind into the universe that is the S&C than to arrive at Settle station and head for Mark Rand’s water tower.

The tower that once filled the tanks that fed the boilers of locomotives as they readied for the Long Drag up to Blea Moor, 15 miles to the north, is arguably the most famous railway water tower in the world. Such status is thanks to Channel 4’s Restoration programme, on which the tower and its occupants, Mark and his wife, Pat, were among the first stars.

Mark had also been, for some time, something of a shining light among the Friends of the Settle–Carlisle Line (FoSCL), occupying at various times the roles of chairman, vice-chairman and press officer.

I’d previously found him a convivial and welcoming host, but knew little of his life before the Friends. Our meeting today would take us from Restoration to ambitious ideas about the railway’s 12future, via his previous life as a senior policeman, in Bradford, at the time of the infamous fire at Bradford City’s football ground, and how he had, since our previous meeting, broken his neck in a fall at the water tower.

Arriving in Settle, it is dull, but still dry, and I’m hoping that the latest forecast Atlantic front will pass through before I have to set off walking in the morning. Negotiating my way past telltale signs of new building projects, to the water tower’s rear door, I greet Mark with the observation that, even in October, the train down was alive with a mix of walkers and both British and overseas visitors – alongside a pretty solid core of passengers with more prosaic reasons for travelling: work, study, visiting friends, and so on.

‘I had a headmaster from Zimbabwe turn up at the door one day,’ smiles Mark, who somehow never seems to tire of showing off the water tower to anyone who might be interested. And with Restoration having been sold to countless overseas TV stations, there are many of them.

Mark and Pat love living in the water tower almost as much as living in Settle, which Mark believes is as close to the perfect little town as anyone can get. ‘We are very happy here, and every facility you can think of, short of an A&E hospital, is within walking distance.’

An A&E hospital might have been quite useful, it turns out, as he shares with me the details of the ‘little accident’ he had when he fell badly on the water tower stairs. In fact, the X-ray of his broken and misplaced vertebrae is the wallpaper on his mobile phone and he’s not shy about sharing it. Ditto the large dent in the wall, created by his head.

‘It seems I fainted and then fell,’ he says, nonchalantly. ‘The paramedics suspected a broken neck and so it took them two and half hours to get me out and into the ambulance. I wasn’t 13too worried, as I remembered as a medical student trying to cut a spinal cord just how tough it was, so I knew that if it wasn’t already broken, it would take a lot to break it.’

Mark ended up in the regional spinal unit at Preston, where various titanium accessories were inserted, so his neck now has more metal in it than Frankenstein’s monster. These days he uses the lift to go up and down the tower and he carries his head just a little awkwardly, which, I reflect, is better than not being able to carry it at all.

I knew little of Mark’s background before this meeting and, if challenged to guess what his career had been before retirement, would probably have struggled to pin the label of senior policeman on his lapel. Ex-policemen tend to have a certain look and it’s not one that Mark shares: he’s altogether more the convivial, grey-haired uncle than Knacker of the Yard. He had been, in fact, Chief Superintendent with West Yorkshire Police, and one day in 1985 he received a phone call in the early hours. A few hours later, he found himself working with the coroner on the identification of victims of the fire at Valley Parade football ground. At a time when modern methods of identification were not available, Mark and his team established a methodology for reconciling the identification of victims with missing person reports, and his experience was subsequently deployed by Interpol.

Mark and Pat’s first home at Settle, after his retirement from the police, was a 17th century Grade I listed building, which they eventually sold to the trustees of the Museum of North Craven Life. As a result, the couple were able to finance the water tower project.

This may be as good a moment as any to recommend a visit to said museum as a suitable prelude to embarking on the long walk to Carlisle. It’s what you might call a ‘small but perfectly formed’ attraction, housing as it does a somewhat esoteric collection of 14photographs and artefacts, including farm implements. You may marvel at aspects of its single most extensive collection – of medical memorabilia and descriptions of 19th century remedies. There’s a smallish room dedicated to introducing you to the railway line, although on my own visit, the excellent interactive map2 was out of action. The café next door is also run by the museum trust and offers nice homemade fare in pleasant surroundings.

But back to Mark and Pat – just how did they get the crazy idea that a redundant water tower might make a nice, or indeed any kind of, practical home?

‘It was our son-in-law, Alan – an American for whom anything older than 1910 is ancient history,’ Mark tells me. ‘He kept pestering us about the tower and was a real pain in the arse. It turned out that the chap who ended up as our architect had also wanted to buy it, only his wife-to-be put her foot down, so he came to us with a head full of ideas. He pleaded to be our architect and though we thought we didn’t need one, as it already came with planning permission to be a dwelling, we brought him on board.’

The architect was Stuart Green, whose avant-garde inspiration, from the 1920s, was ‘a lot more imaginative than the end result, as the planners clipped our wings along the way’. The plans for the conversion involved installing three floors in the tower and hoisting up a glazed rooftop conservatory to sit inside the old water tank itself. ‘The actual building work was only about six months, but buggering about with planners took years,’ he reflects.

Upon completion, an album featuring milestones in the restoration was presented by ‘Restoration Man’ George Clarke, and it now enjoys pride of place in the large open-plan sitting room on the first floor of the tower, where Mark pours an unusually passable glass of home-made red wine. Then we’re joined by another Settle resident and Settle–Carlisle expert, Martin Pearson. It was 15Martin’s diligent posing of countless Freedom of Information requests that cast so much light on the government machinations that preceded the famous 1989 U-turn and reprieve for the S&C, which had been under threat of closure for six years.

I could spend a long time talking to Mark and Martin and not get bored, but my digs, just up the road at the Royal Oak, are beckoning…

There’s only one person in the bar when I go in: the man at the pumps, Simon, shows me to my plain but comfortable room. I opt for a short stroll around town before returning for supper and an evening of live jazz, which looks like it could be interesting. I ask Simon when the jazz will start and receive the confusing response of ‘Eight o’clock, give or take 17 minutes’, accompanied by a slightly manic chuckle from a woman on a bar stool. ‘And the raffle will be at 18 minutes to ten!’ he adds, as I head out of the door.

A short distance down the high street, I spot Bar 13, which I assume to be Settle’s response to the growing trend for independent micro-pubs. I don’t remember it from the last time I stayed in town, back in 2014. That was when I was giving a talk at Victoria Hall, on the fight to save the S&C, as part of the town’s innovative Storytelling Festival.

‘We’ve been here 14 years,’ the barman tells me, confirming just how far ahead of the game this wee town is, for this is a 20-teens micro-pub in all but age, boasting a fine array of some very local ales, some with notable railway themes, like the Kirkby Lonsdale Singletrack.

In my imagination this trip is going to be typified by my rubbing shoulders with new acquaintances in every pub I visit, but I’m suddenly gripped by shyness and choose a table on my own, nonetheless close enough to the neighbouring one for me to earwig their conversation.16

‘Okay,’ says the guy returning with the drinks: ‘Give me songs with parentheses in the title…’

‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper!’ ventures his female companion. ‘Blue Oyster Cult.’

‘Good one! How about Sittin’ On (The Dock Of The Bay)? The Otis Redding classic.’

There follows a short debate about whether the latter has parentheses or not, before the man with the drinks comes up with If You Are Going To San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair). ‘It’s also possibly the longest song title ever,’ he adds. No one is arguing. I want to shout out The Beatles’ Revolution (Number Nine), but that would only show I’ve been listening in and, anyway, I’m still feeling shy.

Back at the Royal Oak, I walk into the function room and am conscious that the average age of those in the room has fallen – something that rarely happens when I walk into anywhere, these days. It quickly rises again when an old lady with a wide smile and a severe shake somehow gets all the way from the bar with her drink without spilling a drop.

A chap takes a call on his mobile and, in something of a stage whisper, starts talking about ‘hairy backs who like jazz’. I’m unsure what a ‘hairy back’ is, though guess it may be associated with the process of hair departing the male head in middle age and relocating to parts of the body where it is unwanted. And then his conversation moves on to illness among mature people: someone has died…

I’m relieved when the arrival of a) my enormous pie supper, and b) the Black Horse Jazzmen mean I no longer have to listen to this gloomy chatter. The latter has a neutral impact on the average age of the room, but a very positive impact on the levels of joy: they’re a truly wonderful trad jazz quartet.

* * *

17It is raining: steadily. That wet rain that no one really wants to walk in. I’m thinking I’ll buy a sandwich for lunch at Ye Olde Naked Man Café, which was a favourite rendezvous for various caving trips, back in my 20s. There were only about four of these trips: three involved getting lost, getting caught in a flood, and my then wife getting stuck in the entrance to Gaping Gill. But I digress from the question of the moment, which is ‘Why is Ye Olde Naked Man so called?’ As with the similar question as to why the Durham suburb of Pity Me is so called, the answer is that no one knows for sure. But the building’s been here since the 17th century, when it was first a funeral parlour and later a pub. Some suggest the moniker may have come from the idea of folk shuffling off this mortal coil as naked as the day they were born.

None of which will make Ye Olde Naked Man any more open than it isn’t at half past eight on a wet October morning. The Copper Kettle rises to my challenge in its stead, and – hefty ham and cheese sandwich in my day bag – I set forth along the little ginnel that takes me from Victoria Hall to where the railway exits the town on the first of its many viaducts.

Crossing the road bridge over the Ribble I’m soon heading for open country, but something is strangely missing. There is not a bird to be seen or heard, and I find my mind straying to that Douglas Adams book, So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, in which the dolphins have decided to leave Earth. Have the birds now followed the lead of our aquatic cousins? Just for the record, a lone wren and a scrawny, rain-soaked crow will represent my total avian sightings all the way to Stainforth.

This is virgin territory for me: I am on the western bank of the Ribble, on the waymarked Ribble Way, which is also the route of our original Settle–Carlisle Way and of all subsequent routes, excluding the early Dalesman walk.18

The first settlement of any note after leaving Settle is Stackhouse, an attractive collection of terraced houses, separated by unmade lanes and almost entirely enclosed by a dry-stone wall. It seems a fittingly rustic point at which to be entering the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

I re-cross the Ribble, muddy brown and slightly swollen, near the weir and the salmon ladders, and soon reach the railway again, before taking a field path, called Stack Lane. The path conceals the faint remains of brick steps that suggest the field might once have been filled with terraces of cottages, perhaps for workers at the nearby mills or quarries.

In a few weeks’ time, I float this idea with Miles Johnson, Senior Historic Environment Officer (archaeologist, to you and me) at the national park. He suggests, rather, that they are all that’s left of former allotments.

My route takes me to a low summit, from where it’s a gentle descent towards one of the line’s most interesting industrial relics, the Hoffmann lime kiln, built adjacent to the railway in 1873 by the Craven Lime Company. This was what was known as a ‘continuous process’ lime kiln, meaning that each of its many furnaces could be lit in turn, with coal and lime added from the top. It’s what the park calls a ‘low-key interpretation site’, which basically means there are a few explanatory signs and then you’re on your own.

Miles will tell me that there’s a new management plan for the site in the making, and there are concerns about its vulnerability because it lost its roof many decades ago and the water’s getting in. I’m pleased, on arrival at the kilns, to take advantage of the shelter they do still offer for perhaps a hundred yards or so, as I stumble across the uneven floor the length of its lugubrious tunnels.

It’s an immensely impressive structure – a veritable cathedral to the mortar of Victorian masonry. I can imagine the bats and spiders roosting in the murky heights of its chambers. Apparently, 19however, it was a couple of metal Spencer kilns that produced the best lime and they were still in use as recently as the Second World War.

Once upon a time, people had grand designs upon this entire site: having begun to accept that the S&C would not be closed, the government was, during the 1980s, feverishly encouraging private initiatives that might help to stimulate a new tourist economy along the line.

One of these was an idea conjured up by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), which used to help to provide employment and a way into work for young school leavers, back in the 1980s. The plan was to make the kilns a major tourist attraction, with much more fancy interpretation than exists now and an aspiration to attract visitors on a similar scale to Beamish, County Durham’s ‘living history’ museum. But the MSC, Edward Heath’s baby, was effectively killed off by the Thatcher government in 1987, and the plan died with it.

Exiting the kiln site, I arrive shortly in the village of Stainforth. I recall writing about the place back in the days when I wrote a regular column for the Yorkshire Post, featuring cameos of villages all across God’s Own County, and each illustrated by a nice pen and ink drawing. I’m tempted to call this a picture-postcard kind of a place, but my cliché alarm is bonging dangerously. So let’s find some ...