“BETWEEN Oughtershaw at the head of Wharfedale and Gayle in Wensleydale runs the steepest motor road in the dales…” So wrote Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby in their classic 1951 book, The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales.
We’ve been following in the footsteps of the writers Marie Hartley, Joan Ingilby and Ella Pontefract, who in the 1930s and ’40s explored this part of Britain to discover its knitting culture and history. For our latest journey into the Yorkshire Dales, we approached Gayle, but by a less vertiginous route - approaching it as most contemporary drivers probably do, from the town of Hawes itself.
Gayle stands maybe less than a mile from the bustle of Hawes, and while the two settlements merge into each other, they are as different from each other now as they were in 1936, when Ella Pontefract wrote: “…Hawes, new and growing; Gayle, old and standing still, as if a spell had been laid upon it.”
We visited in the summer of 2023. Beyond the Wensleydale Creamery, where
