Rylstone Project
Lodge Farm Barn by Andrew Forman
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Rylstone's Water Supply and Usage
As we have seen in the Landscape and Land Use section, Rylstone sits on a low watershed between the Wharfe and the Aire drainage systems. Despite a sizeable catchment area for rain water on Rylstone Fell, the streams that pass through the central and southern parish are small, as the map above shows.
The original siting of the village and its outposts in Fleets, Scale House and Buckerhouse were probably influenced by the abundance of good local water sources. Originally farmers in the parish would have built their farms near to one of the springs that pepper the landscape as described below.
The main stream - Town End Beck - which rises on the slopes of Hall Fell, passes by the Old Hall (previously feeding the Tudor fish ponds there), and descends slowly towards the village and into Rylstone Pond (see screenshot 2). It then progresses into the larger Hetton Beck which forms the boundary between Rylstone and Hetton parishes. This would have been the main source of domestic water for parishioners until mains water was piped in from a small spring above Manor Farm on Rylstone Fell early in the 20th century.
The water system was operated by Craven Water Board (part of Skipton District Council ) until 1973 when it was integrated into Yorkshire Water Authority. The Authority was privatised in 1983 and became Yorkshire water Serviced Ltd. In about 1991 the existing piped water system for Rylstone was disconnected from the spring water system and connected to the Yorkshire water main running from Hetton. The water for this comes from Embsay reservoir and is still in use today.
Outside the main village, the farms on Raikes Road and at Fleets were fed by the Cracoe Water company (CWC) which was one of the first water boards to be set up in our area.
the water was obtained from a spring high up on the North side Cracoe Fell ( on land belonging to the Bolton Abbey Estate owned by the Duke of Devonshire) and made its way to the local farms by gravity. CWC became a private company in 1903, with the directors being local farmers who wanted a more reliable water supply. Col. Maude of Fleets Estate was one of the first directors.
At first the water was nominally treated and then stored in a tank, but more recently, a proper treatment works and larger storage tanks. Under a deal in the 21st Century with Tarmac - the operators of Swindon Quarry - the water system for Cracoe and Fleets / Raikes area is now connected to Yorkshire water mains.
Special Water Usages
No doubt, because of its low water flow, Rylstone Pond was built on Town End Beck to store sufficient water with which to run the small mill that once existed in Rylstone village, below the pond. Little is known about either the building of the pond or the mill, although the remains of an old mill-house existed within living memory. The main mill servicing both Rylstone and Hetton until the early 19th century was sited over on the much larger Hetton Beck near Mill Gate Laithe as shown on the first Screenshot. This was variously a corn mill and then a wool and cotton mill. For more information on the local mills, please see the website pages on Rylstone Mills.
Another key use of water until the mid 20th century was for 'sheep washing' or 'dipping'. This took place in all Dales villages in early summer and was very much a communal event in which the farmers in each parish cooperated.
The Spring, 2007 edition of Times Past gave a description of why sheep washing took place and then set out how it occurred in each village. The relevant sections are reproduced here below.
Each village had a specific location on a local beck for its 'wash dub' or 'sheep wash'. In Rylstone, a site up towards the Fell on Wash Fold Beck on Manor Farm land was used each year. The precise location is shown on the map above. Below is a description in Times Past by Tommy Shuttleworth of where and how this took place. Interestingly, a second sheep wash is shown on the map, close to Green Farm that the Shuttleworths farmed, although they appear to have used the main wash dub on the fell side.
Whilst we have not been able to locate any pictures of sheep washing at Rylstone, we reproduce below two photographs of the Hetton sheep dub, again from the same Times Past article, to show how it took place.
