WHEN Outhwaites Ropery in Hawes, North Yorkshire, closed its doors for good in June 2022, one of the firm’s employees, Caroline Rodgers, bought the machinery and moved it to a unit in nearby Askrigg. ‘I’m 55 years old. I suppose I could have done some-thing else,’ Ms Rodgers admits. ‘However, Outhwaites had been making rope for more than a century and I couldn’t bear to see the tradition of Dales rope-making die.’
It is not only in the Yorkshire Dales that Ms Rodgers’s chosen craft is under threat. Traditional rope-making is on the Heritage Crafts endangered list, alongside other fading skills, such as lorinery, flintknapping and split-cane rod-making. It was not always so. Built in 1791, the ropery at the Royal Naval Dockyard in
