Swaledale
— — stone barns on every hillside, one to a field.
Not only on a wall.
“The northernmost of the Yorkshire Dales, cut by the River Swale from the high fells above Keld down to Richmond at the dale's foot. The valley is held together by drystone walls and field barns — small two-storey stone buildings, one to almost every meadow, used for over-wintering cattle. In June the hay meadows above Muker turn pale with wood crane's-bill and yellow rattle, the last surviving traditional flower-rich meadows in England. Sheep — Swaledales, with curled horns and black faces — work the high ground. The pubs at Muker and Reeth pour Theakston from Masham, twenty miles south. from the studio
Swaledale, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Swaledale is the northernmost of the major Yorkshire Dales, in North Yorkshire, running roughly forty kilometres from the watershed above Keld eastward to Richmond on the dale's lower lip. The River Swale, which gives the dale its name, is sometimes cited as the fastest-flowing river in England, dropping sharply off the high fells before slowing across the lower farmland. The whole upper dale lies within the Yorkshire Dales National Park, designated in 1954. Settlement is sparse and small — Keld, Muker, Gunnerside, Low Row, Reeth — strung along the single valley road. The traditional economy is sheep, hill farming, and former lead mining.
Two stone features define the dale visually: the drystone walls that net the hillsides into small irregular fields, and the field barns scattered one to a meadow. The walls and barns together make up one of the densest historic agricultural landscapes in Europe and are the centrepiece of the National Park's Every Barn, Every Wall conservation programme. Most of the standing stone is local Carboniferous limestone and gritstone, quarried within sight of where it sits. The barns, built largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, housed a few cattle on the ground floor and the hay above. Many are now in slow restoration.
The narrow valley meadows above Muker are the most celebrated traditional hay meadows surviving in England — late-cut, fertilised lightly with farmyard manure, and never reseeded. They flower from late May into early July with wood crane's-bill, pignut, yellow rattle, and meadow buttercup, peaking in mid-June. The Muker Meadows are managed under a long-running agri-environment agreement and crossed by stone-flagged footpaths that keep walkers off the standing crop. The hay is cut in mid- to late July and the colour returns to the high fells: heather purpling the moor above the dale through August and early September.