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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.
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