Ingleton, North Yorkshire
Ingleton is a village and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. The village is from Kendal and from Lancaster on the western side of the Pennines. It is from Settle. The River Doe and the River Twiss meet to form the source of the River Greta, a tributary of the River Lune. The village is on the A65 road and at the head of the A687. The B6255 takes the south bank of the River Doe to Ribblehead and Hawes. All that remains of the railway in the village is the landmark Ingleton Viaduct. Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular visitor to the area and was married locally, as his mother lived at Masongill from 1882 to 1917. It has been claimed that there is evidence that the inspiration for the name Sherlock Holmes came from here.
Whernside, north-north-east of the village, one of the Yorkshire Three Peaks, is the highest point in the parish at.
There are major quarries within the parish. Ingleton Quarry is active, Meal Bank Quarry no longer is, but extracted Carboniferous limestone and possesses an early Hoffman kiln. There was a textile mill, and the coalfield supported twelve or more small collieries, but Ingleton is mostly known for its tourism, being partially in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, offering waterfalls in a SSSI, limestone caves and Karst landscape walking opportunities.
History
Ingleton and the surrounding area was settled in the Iron Age by the Brigantes who built a hill fort on top of Ingleborough with walls in circumference. It is thought that the Romans defeated the Brigantes in battle and built a fort alongside the hill fort. The valley was crossed by Roman roads as Ingleton was a strategic river crossing. By the 12th century the Normans had built a church in the village.The name Ingleton derives from the Old English ingeltūn meaning 'settlement by a peak'.
Manor
Willian Lowther of Ingleton Hall was Lord of the Manor, Justice of the Peace for the West Riding and had seven children. His son Richard inherited the manor and two sons joined the church. His daughter Frances married John Walker who leased the Ingleton Colleries, and Elizabeth married Anthony Bouch in 1633 and mortgaged Ingleton Manor.Richard Lowther and his son Gerrard were on the losing Royalist side at the Civil War siege of Pontefract Castle in 1645, and later at Newark. The war ended and his father dead, Gerrard was fined by the new government for his delinquency, and entered into a series of agreements to pay the debt and court appearances to maintain the estate. The Lord of Manor title had passed to Anthony Bouch by 1665, and the coal rights passed to the Walker family after a settlement in the chancery court in 1678.
Industry
The Ingleton Coalfield was worked for 400 years. It is about 6 miles long by 4-mile wide and extends into the neighbouring parishes of Burton in Lonsdale and Thornton-in-Lonsdale. The coalfield terminates at the South Craven fault. The coal measures are shallow and represent the lowest layers in the Pennine coal measures sequence. The earliest coal mining occurred along the River Greta where Four Foot and Six Foot seams outcrop. Most deep mining was at New Ingleton Pit sunk in 1913. Its sinking led to the discovery of the Ten Foot seam at 127 yards, and the Nine Foot seam at 134 yards. Beneath them are the Four Foot seam at 233 yards, the Three Foot seam at 236 yards and the Six Foot seam at 260 yards. Commercially viable deposits of fireclay lay under the Three Foot seam and pottery clay beneath the Six Foot seam used to make Ingleton Bricks.The Walkers achieved their legal victory through a son-in-Law William Knipe. Thomas Moore was the second husband of Marianne Walker and between 1702 and 1711 bought out other share holders in the collieries while building a successful medical practice in Wakefield. He left the collieries to be managed by an agent. His daughter Susannah married William Serjeantson- and his family ran the collieries from 1736 to 1828. Coal was delivered by horse and cart. Ingleton and Bentham Moors were enclosed in 1767. Plans were drawn up in 1780 to connect Ingleton to the Leeds & Liverpool Canal via Clapham, Settle and Foulridge, Colne but it never progressed. Boys and girls as young as four worked the collieries in the 1780, first as 'messengers' and from six, underground, as 'trailers', pulling coal tubs. The last mine was closed in 1940.
Ingleton Mill was built in 1791 by four partners who also had built a mill in Clapham in 1786. The partners, George Armitstead, a cotton spinner, Ephraim Ellis, William Petty and Thomas Wigglesworth bought the barn beside the old corn mill and built the mill. They obtained iron for its construction from Kirkstall Forge. They ran a joiner's shop, smithy and cotton mill. It was sold in 1807 and used to spin flax by John Coates, before reverting to cotton spinning in 1837..
Governance
Ingleton is a civil parish. The parish council has 11 councillors and elections are held every four years. Until 1974 it was part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. From 1974 to 2023 it was part of the district of Craven, it is now administered by the unitary North Yorkshire Council.The village is within the Skipton and Ripon parliamentary constituency, represented by Julian Smith, a member of the Conservative Party, since 2010.
Geography
The civil parish of Ingleton is extensive, stretching from Blea Moor near Wold Fell in the north to Newby Moor in the south. The north of the parish follows the county boundary with Lancashire to Whernside. From here it follows the ridge south-west to West Fell and down to Thornton Force on the River Twiss, and thence along the river, and the River Greta to Fourlands Hill. The east of the parish follows the watershed of the River Ure, a headwater of the River Humber, and the River Ribble to Grove Head where it is only 200m from the Pennine Way, it drops to the B6255 road and the River Ribble at the milepost at SD 793816. The boundary follows the Ribble through Ribblehead, then takes the ridge through Park Fell and Simon Fell to Ingleborough. It passes due south over Ingleborough Common to Newbury Moss, descending to Cold Cotes on the old road at SD 722712. Ingleborough is high.The village sits at the foot of Ingleborough, separated from Thornton-in-Lonsdale by the Rivers Greta and Twiss, some of the facilities that form the settlement being thus outside the civil parish. The peaks of Ingleborough and Whernside lies within the parish; separated by the deeply eroded valley of the River Doe. Both these peaks are formed by millstone grit on limestone footings. To the north of the river are the Twistleton Crags with the important limestone pavement of Scales Moor. Here are two SSSIs: Whernside and Scales Moor Common which is managed as stinted pasture. To the south of the river is one SSSI: Ingleton on the stinted Ingleton Common, in the number of an equivalent limestone pavement. This area contains a number of challenging potholes and caves. The show cave White Scar Caves has its entrance in the civil parish. Ingleton Common adjoins Clapham Common and they are collectively referred to as Ingleborough Common.
Historically, mining and agriculture were the predominant industries in the area. Coal was extracted from the Ingleton Coalfield from the early 1600s, to the turn of the 20th century, eventually closing in 1936. The New Village estate was built for mine workers.
Geology
A varied geology is found within the boundaries of the parish, ranging from rocks laid down in the Iapetus Ocean in Ordovician times, through the Carboniferous limestones of the Askrigg Block on Whernside and Ingleborough and coal measures within the Craven Basin, to the Quaternary drumlin field in Ribblehead. It is a classic field study area for students of geology.Much of the parish is dominated by Carboniferous deposits deposited on the submarine platform of the Askrigg Block, which was a relatively high area forming a shelf sea buoyed up by Devonian Wensleydale Granite. It is separated from the Craven Basin to the south and west by the Craven Fault system. The lower Carboniferous deposits are dominated by the thick Great Scar limestones laid down during the Viséan stage. A mature karst landscape has formed where it outcrops, with bare limestone pavements, subterranean streams, and major solutional cave systems such as White Scar Caves and Meregill Hole. Scales Moor on the Whernside flanks of Chapel-le-Dale has one of the largest exposures of pavement in the Dales, measuring some long wide. On Whernside and Ingleborough above the flat plateau formed by the top of the Great Scar limestone, are the Brigantian and Namurian aged Yoredale cyclothem sequences of sandstone, limestone, and shales which were deposited on the edge of a huge delta. The upper ramparts of these hills are capped by thick beds of Grassington Grit, a course poorly-sorted sandstone laid down in shallower water as the delta prograded south.
The Carboniferous rocks were deposited unconformably onto basement rocks which are exposed as inliers in Chapel-le-Dale and lower Kingsdale. They are Ordovician in age, deposited as turbidites about 480 million years ago in the Iapetus Ocean, and heavily folded and lightly metamorphosed in late Ordovician times. They are currently quarried for roadstone, and were once quarried for slate in the Ingleton Glens.
Just to the north of Ingleton village the Craven Faults running north-west to south-east mark the southern margin of the Askrigg Block. The North Craven Fault has a downthrow of about, and a few hundred yards away the South Craven Fault has a downthrow of about. The fault plane of the North Craven Fault is exposed in Swilla Glen. To the south of the Craven Faults is the Craven Basin where the Westphalian stage Pennine Coal Measures are exposed, once exploited by the Ingleton coalfield.
The landscape in the north-east of the parish, beyond the Ribblehead Viaduct, is dominated by Devensian glacial deposits, and includes some of the Ribblehead Drumlin Field.