- Published on
There are some places where the landscape seems to come with its own weather, its own mood and, very often, its own stories. Stainmore is one of them.
It is a high, exposed crossing of the Pennines, a place of great skies and long horizons. To the east the land falls away towards the Vale of York; to the west lie the Cumbrian Fells. Up on the pass, though, you have that peculiar sensation of being suspended somewhere between the two.
And it is the setting for a wonderfully dark tale.
Long ago, a lone traveller arrived at an isolated inn on Stainmore and asked for a bed for the night. The traveller appeared to be a woman, but sometime after everyone had retired it was discovered that the mysterious guest was actually a man — and one with a particularly unpleasant object in his possession.
It was a Hand of Glory.
According to folklore, this was the severed hand of a hanged criminal, preserved and made into a kind of candle. When its fingers were lit, the Hand of Glory had the power to send everyone in a house into an enchanted sleep, leaving thieves free to go about their business undisturbed.
Or so the story goes.
That night on Stainmore the hand worked almost perfectly. The innkeeper and his wife fell into a deep sleep while the robber went to unbar the door for his accomplices.
But the maid was still awake.
Realising what was happening, she tried to extinguish the burning hand. Water wouldn't do it, but milk would. She doused the Hand of Glory, seized a loaded blunderbuss and confronted the thieves, who evidently decided that discretion was the better part of valour and fled.
The innkeeper and his wife eventually awoke to find their remarkably resourceful maid — and the remains of the still-smoking hand.
It is the sort of story that seems entirely at home on Stainmore.
Even today there is something wonderfully remote about the pass. The weather comes sweeping across it, clouds travelling from west to east in great processions, while the moorland below seems to stretch away almost without interruption.
That was the feeling I wanted in Stainmore Skyline.
I made the building deliberately small. It sits as a dark interruption on the horizon, almost swallowed by the moor and the immense sky above it. Rather than describing the place in detail, I wanted to give a sense of its isolation — the subdued colour of the land, the streaming clouds and the feeling of being very high up and a very long way from anywhere.
Knowing the story changes the landscape too.
A lonely building on a ridge is one thing. A lonely inn where, according to legend, a robber once lit the fingers of a dead man's hand to cast its occupants into an enchanted sleep is quite another.
That is one of the reasons stories of place fascinate me. They become attached to the landscape and alter the way we see it. You can arrive knowing nothing and simply admire the view. Discover what happened — or what people believed happened — and suddenly the same hills, buildings and empty spaces acquire another dimension.
There is one final twist to the tale. The Hand of Glory is not confined entirely to legend. A preserved hand traditionally identified as one can still be seen in Whitby Museum.
Whether you believe in its powers is, of course, another matter.
For me, Stainmore has quite enough atmosphere without lighting the thing.
Stainmore Skyline — watercolour
From The Striding Dales exhibition at Masham Gallery.
It is a high, exposed crossing of the Pennines, a place of great skies and long horizons. To the east the land falls away towards the Vale of York; to the west lie the Cumbrian Fells. Up on the pass, though, you have that peculiar sensation of being suspended somewhere between the two.
And it is the setting for a wonderfully dark tale.
Long ago, a lone traveller arrived at an isolated inn on Stainmore and asked for a bed for the night. The traveller appeared to be a woman, but sometime after everyone had retired it was discovered that the mysterious guest was actually a man — and one with a particularly unpleasant object in his possession.
It was a Hand of Glory.
According to folklore, this was the severed hand of a hanged criminal, preserved and made into a kind of candle. When its fingers were lit, the Hand of Glory had the power to send everyone in a house into an enchanted sleep, leaving thieves free to go about their business undisturbed.
Or so the story goes.
That night on Stainmore the hand worked almost perfectly. The innkeeper and his wife fell into a deep sleep while the robber went to unbar the door for his accomplices.
But the maid was still awake.
Realising what was happening, she tried to extinguish the burning hand. Water wouldn't do it, but milk would. She doused the Hand of Glory, seized a loaded blunderbuss and confronted the thieves, who evidently decided that discretion was the better part of valour and fled.
The innkeeper and his wife eventually awoke to find their remarkably resourceful maid — and the remains of the still-smoking hand.
It is the sort of story that seems entirely at home on Stainmore.
Even today there is something wonderfully remote about the pass. The weather comes sweeping across it, clouds travelling from west to east in great processions, while the moorland below seems to stretch away almost without interruption.
That was the feeling I wanted in Stainmore Skyline.
I made the building deliberately small. It sits as a dark interruption on the horizon, almost swallowed by the moor and the immense sky above it. Rather than describing the place in detail, I wanted to give a sense of its isolation — the subdued colour of the land, the streaming clouds and the feeling of being very high up and a very long way from anywhere.
Knowing the story changes the landscape too.
A lonely building on a ridge is one thing. A lonely inn where, according to legend, a robber once lit the fingers of a dead man's hand to cast its occupants into an enchanted sleep is quite another.
That is one of the reasons stories of place fascinate me. They become attached to the landscape and alter the way we see it. You can arrive knowing nothing and simply admire the view. Discover what happened — or what people believed happened — and suddenly the same hills, buildings and empty spaces acquire another dimension.
There is one final twist to the tale. The Hand of Glory is not confined entirely to legend. A preserved hand traditionally identified as one can still be seen in Whitby Museum.
Whether you believe in its powers is, of course, another matter.
For me, Stainmore has quite enough atmosphere without lighting the thing.
Stainmore Skyline — watercolour
From The Striding Dales exhibition at Masham Gallery.
- Published on
There is a particular peace to the walk up to Old Gang. The stream murmurs alongside the track, curlews call across the moor and, as you climb, the dale opens out beneath one of those enormous Yorkshire skies.
It is hard to imagine that this quiet landscape was once a place of intense industry.
High between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale, Old Gang was part of the great lead-mining landscape of the northern Dales. What remains today is scattered across the hillside: the old chimney, the ruins of the smelting mill, the peat store which supplied its fuel and the entrances to adits — horizontal tunnels driven into the hillside in search of veins of lead.
Lead from the Swaledale mines travelled a long way from these remote valleys. It was used on buildings across the country, including churches, and Swaledale lead is associated with the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
But it is what happened beneath the surface that particularly fascinates me.
Mining has always attracted stories and superstitions. Perhaps that is hardly surprising. Imagine spending your working life underground, surrounded by darkness, following a vein of metal whose direction and richness could never be entirely predicted.
In the Dales there were stories of mysterious knockers underground. At Old Gang there is the tale of T’Auld Man, a presence whose distant tapping in the darkness was said to lead miners towards a rich seam of lead. You would do well, apparently, to listen.
The miners took other precautions too. Hagstones — stones naturally pierced by a hole — were hung from the roofs of the tunnels as protection against witchcraft. It is a wonderful detail: men engaged in the intensely physical business of cutting their way through rock, while keeping an ear open for something they could not see and hanging stones above their heads to guard against things they could not explain.
Today, almost all of that activity has disappeared.
That contrast was what interested me when I came to paint Old Gang Lead Mines. I wanted the chimney to stand almost as a marker in the landscape: a solitary reminder of the industry and the lives that once occupied these otherwise quiet hills.
Around it, the dale is slowly taking everything back. Fallen stones settle into the ground. Walls crumble. Grass and moorland reclaim the workings. Above them the weather continues to move across the hills just as it must have done when the smelting mill was working and men were disappearing into the hillside each morning.
In the painting I wanted to capture that strange meeting of time and landscape. The dale lies golden beneath a changing sky while the remains of the mine seem gradually to dissolve back into it. Nature is erasing the evidence, not dramatically, but patiently.
Perhaps the painting is an elegy of sorts — not simply for a ruined mine, but for a vanished way of life.
That is one of the things that draws me repeatedly to places like Old Gang. At first you see a landscape: hills, ruins, a stream and a vast sky. Then you begin to discover what happened there. The people who worked beneath your feet come back into the picture, along with their hardships, their beliefs and the stories they told one another about those unexplained sounds in the darkness.
The people themselves have gone. The landscape remains. But if you know where to look — and perhaps where to listen — their presence is still there.
Old Gang Lead Mines, Swaledale — watercolour
From The Striding Dales exhibition at Masham Gallery, September 2026.
It is hard to imagine that this quiet landscape was once a place of intense industry.
High between Swaledale and Arkengarthdale, Old Gang was part of the great lead-mining landscape of the northern Dales. What remains today is scattered across the hillside: the old chimney, the ruins of the smelting mill, the peat store which supplied its fuel and the entrances to adits — horizontal tunnels driven into the hillside in search of veins of lead.
Lead from the Swaledale mines travelled a long way from these remote valleys. It was used on buildings across the country, including churches, and Swaledale lead is associated with the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London.
But it is what happened beneath the surface that particularly fascinates me.
Mining has always attracted stories and superstitions. Perhaps that is hardly surprising. Imagine spending your working life underground, surrounded by darkness, following a vein of metal whose direction and richness could never be entirely predicted.
In the Dales there were stories of mysterious knockers underground. At Old Gang there is the tale of T’Auld Man, a presence whose distant tapping in the darkness was said to lead miners towards a rich seam of lead. You would do well, apparently, to listen.
The miners took other precautions too. Hagstones — stones naturally pierced by a hole — were hung from the roofs of the tunnels as protection against witchcraft. It is a wonderful detail: men engaged in the intensely physical business of cutting their way through rock, while keeping an ear open for something they could not see and hanging stones above their heads to guard against things they could not explain.
Today, almost all of that activity has disappeared.
That contrast was what interested me when I came to paint Old Gang Lead Mines. I wanted the chimney to stand almost as a marker in the landscape: a solitary reminder of the industry and the lives that once occupied these otherwise quiet hills.
Around it, the dale is slowly taking everything back. Fallen stones settle into the ground. Walls crumble. Grass and moorland reclaim the workings. Above them the weather continues to move across the hills just as it must have done when the smelting mill was working and men were disappearing into the hillside each morning.
In the painting I wanted to capture that strange meeting of time and landscape. The dale lies golden beneath a changing sky while the remains of the mine seem gradually to dissolve back into it. Nature is erasing the evidence, not dramatically, but patiently.
Perhaps the painting is an elegy of sorts — not simply for a ruined mine, but for a vanished way of life.
That is one of the things that draws me repeatedly to places like Old Gang. At first you see a landscape: hills, ruins, a stream and a vast sky. Then you begin to discover what happened there. The people who worked beneath your feet come back into the picture, along with their hardships, their beliefs and the stories they told one another about those unexplained sounds in the darkness.
The people themselves have gone. The landscape remains. But if you know where to look — and perhaps where to listen — their presence is still there.
Old Gang Lead Mines, Swaledale — watercolour
From The Striding Dales exhibition at Masham Gallery, September 2026.