Human activity in the vicinity of Preston-under-Scar, goes back over 4,000 years. Pastoral farmers of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages were attracted by the south-facing slopes of the Dale, the abundant water and wood, the glacial detritus supplying stone. The traces of ancient settlements and field systems are scattered along the lower slopes of the Scar, from Leyburn westwards. Adjacent to the modern cemetery is a round barrow (unusual in a valley-bottom site, and damaged during the building of the railway in the 1870s) thought to date from c 2000 – 1500 BCE. Local place names bear witness to the overlay of Saxon and Norse cultures and languages. Preston is recorded in the Conqueror’s ‘Domesday’ survey of 1086 (though it appears to have been deserted at the time). Occasionally, the village shows up in the national record. The Society of Religious Friends was an energetic element within the vibrant dissenting tradition of the Dales, and Richard Robinson, one of the early Wensleydale Quaker pioneers was born in Preston-under-Scar in 1628. In the succeeding centuries we get glimpses of a rural community of small-scale farming and cottage industry. As was true across rural Europe of the time, the inhabitants lived in poverty, and supplemented their income and food supply with a variety of expedients. Most households did, however, enjoy rights to graze their beasts on the communal land of Preston Pasture above the village. Nevertheless, the agricultural depression of the late 1700s and early 1800s hit hard. The meagre provision of ‘outdoor relief’ was stretched to the limit, and food riots – violently suppressed by the militia - took place in several local villages as well as in Richmond itself.
The relations between a small community and the wider economy and society have passed through many phases. From the early 1840s there was a boom in the lead industry. A much expanded Keld Heads mine and smelt mill (a kind of one-stop shop for all aspects of lead production) opened in 1843.
Photo: Keld Heads Mine and Smelt Mill today
The population, 301 in 1841, rose to 394 by 1861 – over twice the size of the village now. Were we to be transported in time, we would be astonished at the size of the families crammed into tiny cottages (as many as 12 people to a household), and the high proportions of children and young people (most of those over 13 already at work). In 1861 and 1871 respectively children and teenagers accounted for 49% and 45% of the village population. The jobs listed in the census (and many families juggled several) included lead miner or smelter, coal miner, school master, game keeper, shepherd, woodsman, apprentice cabinet maker, and molecatcher, as well as ‘teacher of music’. Further servants and estate workers lived at or in the neighbourhood of Bolton Hall. Towards the end of the 19th century, the census shows a further diversification as railway workers make an appearance.
Yet the lead era was to be short-lived, falling victim to the difficult and frequently flooded underground terrain and cheaper imports. In the early 1890s the Keld Heads complex was abandoned for good. Yet Preston retained connections to the wider world. In 1878 the North Eastern Railway branch which had reached Leyburn in 1856, reached Hawes. Wensley was the nearest station for Preston. A service of five trains a day in each direction between Hawes and Northallerton (and from 1879 with a further link to the Midland Railway Settle – Carlisle route at Garsdale), opened up a new era in the relations between the Wensleydale villages and the wider world. Produce in the shops and pubs diversified, builders and other craftsmen could acquire materials from outside the immediate neighbourhood. Tourists began to frequent the area, and increasingly guest houses appear in the tourist guides. (By 1925 one John Carter Emmet had opened a Temperance Hotel in Preston-under-Scar: ‘Refreshments &c. Sitting and two bedrooms’). Some lead miners migrated, some moved to other parts of the country, others found employment in the expanding quarries. Around the turn of the 19th / 20th centuries, the nature of quarrying altered from a norm of small local quarries supplying building stone (and limestone for mortar or to be burned in local kilns for field dressing), to ever larger quarries exporting limestone to the blast furnaces of Teesside, then, as the twentieth century advanced, aggregates for roadstone and the construction industry. Here, too, the railway played a major part. While milk was one major export, limestone was the other. Crushed stone from the quarry above Preston was ferried by an overhead ropeway system to the sidings outside Wensley Station for shipment to Middlesbrough and beyond. In the other direction, the railway was bringing high quality (and, ultimately, cheaper) coal into the Dale for the domestic market. In 1936 the local historian Ella Pontefract (an acute observer) compares Preston to the other villages under the ridge (Carperby, Castle Bolton, Redmire) and notes that
"Those who visit the Dale now perhaps rejoice that the mines with their fumes and dirt are no more, but their closing is still sufficiently near for the sadness to be remembered. The industry had graven itself into the minds and traditions of the people …." Ella Pontefract, Wensleydale (p.187)
She continues
"Preston has kept more than the others the air of a mining village, and it has been slower than they in throwing off the subsequent look of decay. But nothing can rob it of its position. It lies under a rocky crag, and seems to be clinging to it …." [Pontefract, p.188)
While it has retained an ambiguous relationship to its industrial heritage, the village (even lacking, since the 1950s, a shop or a pub) has, thanks to the investment of energy, sociability, and money by so many community-minded people, travelled a long way to its relatively prosperous modern state.
Ideas for further reading:
Iain Spensley’s Mines and Miners of Wensleydale (2014) provides a wealth of information. Further information about Preston-under-Scar has to be gleaned from a variety of sources. Harry Speight’s history / travelogue Romantic Richmondshire is a Victorian classic. Anything by the trio of Askrigg historians Ella Pontefract, Marie Hartley, and Joan Ingleby is worth reading, especially, in this case, Pontefract’s Wensleydale. Christine Hallas has written engagingly on The Wensleydale Railway (1991); Tony Waltham, The Yorkshire Dales: Landscape and Geology (2007) is a helpful introduction; unfortunately, Knighton and Anne Butterworth’s history Once in Preston-under-Scar (1993) is out of print – though copies have been spotted on AbeBooks. Clive Torrens’ two Bygone Yorkshire books of historic postcards and photographs are a treasure trove.
Information about the barrow can be found at https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1014358?section=official-list-entry And Keld Heads Complex at https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1014763
The author is grateful to David Brooks and Clive Torrens for illuminating conversations.