Twenty members assembled at Tatham Fells Old School for a very breezy afternoon exploration on foot of local sites of historical interest, arranged and led by John Wilson, with the kind agreement of landowners. We visited a nearby circular depression, thought to be the site of a bloomery, a type of primitive iron-smelting pit. We then followed part of a disused mill race, which once supplied water to a mill beside Lowgill Lane, up to Foss Bank, a farmstead with an unusual and puzzling trio of adjoining farmhouses thought to have been built successively over the 17th to 19th centuries. At Beethams we learned of 17th-century ne’er-do-well residents involved in the often capital crime of coin-clipping, before heading out onto Burn Moor, with fine views of the Dales fells. We made a brief incursion into Yorkshire to visit the Great Stone of Fourstones (providing welcome shelter from the wind) before descending to Fourstones House, a nineteenth-century shooting lodge built on the site of Hodgsons Farm, and just inches inside Lancashire; its outbuildings are in Yorkshire. Then by field paths to Usherwoods, where time and hunger forced a slight itinerary adjustment, and a bee-line return to the Old School for tea and delicious home-baked cakes.
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