Penelope Hemingway travels to the Yorkshire Dales to uncover the true identity of a legendary Dales knitter
“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 we stopped to buy Wensleydale cheese, the tourists petered out as we headed towards Gayle. You can stand on the bridge over Gayle Beck, the fast-flowing stream that once powered the massive Gayle Mill, or walk down the quiet, snaking lane called The Wynd, innocent of any street name sign, and too small for any vehicle (therefore Google Earth’s maps) to drive down.
The Wynd was once thronging with knitters; women, children and men. Some, on a summer day like this, might have been knitting in their doorways; the children maybe wandering far and wide, needles in hand and ‘clue’ (ball) of yarn tucked in a pocket, knitting as they went.
Today, the Wynd is gentrified: holiday homes and neat stone cottages. Once, it was poor and ramshackle and, as Ella Pontefract, wrote, it was the most insular and hard to infiltrate of all Dales villages that the women had researched. Gayle was a place with few outsiders, and people from other villages who married into a Gayle family would take years to be accepted. Everyone went by nicknames (like ‘Molly i’ th’ Wynd’), to the point that nobody recognised given names.
The village once had a Sandemanian chapel, and those who now sleep in
