SMALL pieces of Yorkshire Dales National Park history are now being recorded for the first time.

Detailed records of nearly 29,000 bigger items – like old houses, barns and lime kilns – already exist in the shape of a Historic Environment Record (HER) that has been compiled by experts at the Park Authority (YDNPA).

Churnstand
Photo: YDNPA

Now the Authority’s archaeology staff and Dales Volunteers have started logging all the less noticeable, smaller features – ranging from stands for milk churns to tunnels under roads for sheep and cattle – so they can be added to the HER.

And the first batch of new additions has just been turned into a series of pages on the YDNPA website called Feature of the Season.

Miles Johnson, the Authority’s Countryside Archaeological Advisor, said: “Many of the features were part of the everyday farming landscape but none has been recorded before.

“They all add to the special character of the National Park and the main reason for putting them on the website is to make them more accessible to people who may want to learn more about them and may be interested in understanding the Dales landscape in more detail.

“Many are now disused and some are threatened so, by recording them in the HER, we have a detailed list that will help us and other organisations to preserve and conserve them and will enable people to learn about them too.”

Feature of the Season was launched as a volunteer project in February last year following the previous successful use of Dales Volunteers for surveys into the numbers of buildings and monuments at risk in the National Park.

“We needed to collect information about small-scale historic features but, obviously, these small buildings and structures are almost impossible to locate from maps or aerial photographs,” Miles said.

“The idea was to use the Dales Volunteer’s interest in, and knowledge of individual parts of the Dales to collect the detailed information.”

The first ‘Feature of the Season’ highlights several different items.

So far the Dales Volunteers have logged 50 stock underpasses – passages beneath walled roads and tracks that enabled cattle and sheep to pass from one field to another, normally to get to water – as well as nearly 100 churn stands, hennery piggeries (combined henhouses and piggeries) and turbary stones that marked areas where people could cut peat.

Stone water troughs, polegate posts, dovecotes and millstones will also be on a growing list of other features that will be put under the spotlight as the project continues.

“Revisiting some of the features already recorded has shown that there are serious threats facing some of them,” Miles said.

“For example, one of the churn stands recently disappeared when a farm track was widened and one of the buildings is threatened with demolition in the near future while others are showing sign of structural decay.”

The FoS project along with datasheets and images of the features can be seen online at www.yorkshiredales.org.uk/fos