![]() ![]() Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby going over a map and planning one of their research trips They collected historical objects from estate and farm sales, and accepted them from Dales people who heard that they were looking for things. In the 1950s and 1960s, Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby, two tenacious women, travelled the Yorkshire Dales asking people about farm tools and knitted gloves, inglenook fireplaces and cheese-pressing stones. Like so many regional museums in Britain, the museum had its beginnings with passionate Britons who recognized that the traditional farming and working life of the Dales was rapidly changing in the twentieth century. The daily work of the Dales people forms the heart of the collection of the Dales Countryside Museum. The hardiness of the sheep mirrors the hardiness of the people who conjured their existence on farms and in remote villages from their “finger ends.” Hardy sheep are hefted to the land or “heughed” as the locals say. Gray stone farmhouses and barns stand lonely and sentry-like halfway up hills carved by ice millennia ago. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Dales are like no other place in England. On one of those bright spring days that makes you think you might be able to break out a cotton cardigan instead of a woolly sweater, I travelled from my sea-level town in Lancashire to Hawes, the highest market town in the Yorkshire Dales. It all had to come from your finger ends.” ![]()
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