Great Close - Malham Moor

Great Close Cattle Fair

Notes from a talk given to Malhamdale Local History Group by Richard Harland November 1998

Great Close, said to be one of the largest pasture fields in the North of England, is renowned in local memory on account of the immense "fairs" or markets for the sale of cattle, sheep and horses that were formerly held within its one-and-a-seventh square miles. At Malham there had long been held an annual fair for the marketing of farm stock around the 15 October. In 1745 or 1746 a much larger and longer annual market of regional significance was initiated by the Skipton-based John Birtwhistle. Being earlier in the year it would not supplant the traditional fair.

In 1786 Thomas Hurtley the Malham schoolmaster described the circumstances, which would be well and accurately known to him:

The event was famed for Scotch cattle, besides sheep and horses frequently in great numbers. The cattle were driven direct from Scotland to Great Close; Birtwhistle has had 10,000 head on the road from Scotland at one time. Frequently as many as 5000 cattle were assembled in Great Close, and 20,000 had passed through the field in the course of a Summer; these in addition to the sheep and horses.

There is no reason to doubt Hurtley's date of 1745 as the year when Birtwhistle first made his trading contacts in western Scotland. He bought direct from the producers in their home territory and not merely in the great trysts held at Crieff and Falkirk in the Lowlands. His initiative must almost at once have found unsavoury reinforcement through the savage suppression that followed Culloden. This included wholesale plundering of cattle by Cumberland's troops. News of what was happening reached the dealers of Galloway and Yorkshire and from there graziers at once took horse to the Highlands. Cumberland welcomed them. The primary purpose of driving off the cattle was to break and destroy the economy of the Jacobite clans, but he quickly saw a secondary value. The money received from the sale of the stock to Lowland and English dealers was distributed among his soldiers. It kept their morale high and their rebel-hunting enthusiasm in good fettle.

John Birtwhistle was not the only trader involved in driving cattle direct from the Highlands and side-stepping the lowland trysts. But the trade was not all profit. In 1746 Alexander Gray and William Dunbar, drovers from Ross-shire, brought cattle down to Yorkshire. Alexander had written from Newcastle of disappointing sales, and he wrote again from Skipton on 30 October 1746 to William Baillie, his principal back home, reporting sluggish trade:-

Already at the date of the survey made for the owner Thomas Lister in 1760, Great Close was split, just as a wall still splits it, into two parts. These were aptly described in the Survey as the higher and the lower parts, and are named on the modern map as East and West Great Close. In 1760 both were in Birtwhistle's tenancy with an aggregate of 727 acres, which accords with Hurtley's upwards of 732 acres. Tenanted as one, they were no doubt managed as one, for Hurtley describes the whole as one pasture. Possibly the boundary was insubstantial, for the present division wall is questionably as old as 1760.

Sir Walter Scott's Two Drovers and recent studies make clear that the Scottish drovers and their herds travelled by strong preference over uncultivated hills, by green lanes and other routes. Great Close was well served by such routes.

J.W.Morkill's statement in 1933 that the great cattle fairs lapsed before the mid-18th century is an evident error for "mid eighteen hundreds". The fairs predominantly of cattle were succeeded by, or merged into, equally impressive sheep fairs held around Malham's traditional October sales. Frederic Montagu in 1838 described the event in his own period:-

Morkill says these continued until the completion of the railway systems, which must take them up to about 1850, after the railway reached Skipton in 1847. Clearly such numbers could not be handled and sold in the field within the village that was used this century for sheep and cattle auctions. It is not fanciful to see Great Close as a venue; nor to see sheep following the same routes over the hills as cattle.

It would be the scene of the nightly festivities described by Morkill in 1933. There is preserved in manuscript an account of two other social events at this old inn remembered and recorded in 1934 in a MS note by Tom Yeadon, events trivial in themselves but worthy to be preserved:

Immediately through Great Close Gate the land is wet, often flowing in water. Both the 1850 and later l9th. Century OS maps show the track to Arncliffe Cote going direct through this area whereas modern maps record an attempt, unsuccessful perhaps, to skirt it; wetness underfoot was of little moment to horse riders or drovers.

Uphill from Great Close Gate, at SD 9105 6650, an area of ruins extends over some 40 yards by 18 yards, with traces of two or three buildings and associated enclosures. I am not aware that the recent history and archaeology of Great Close has yet been written up, so I make my own surmise that these ruins like those in West Great Close can be linked with the fairs.

The drovers used the green lanes and the unenclosed higher land to move their stock and in order to maintain the condition of the animals and allow for grazing on the way, would cover 10-12 miles a day, preferably resting in enclosed ground at night, but not i villages where stock could easily get mixed up. This required the great number of wayside ‘rest houses’ or inns. Many of those sited well away from roads or villages have disappeared from the landscape, or are just a pile of stones with little or no clue to their past. Another inn in the Malhamdale area is reputed to have been at Boss Moor, complete with a "beer cellar" built underground for coolness.

The Birtwhistles
John Birtwhistle came of Skipton parents, Thomas and Anne Birtwhistle. In 1714-16 Thomas described himself as a grazier and thereafter as a farmer. John was their eldest son, born on 23 March 1714. Two brothers, Richard and William, and three daughters, Mary, Martha and Grace, followed.
John's marriage is not recorded in the Skipton register, so we do not know the surname of his wife who is called variously Jennet, Janet and Jane in the register but most often Jennet. Tom Lord has grounds for suspecting that John had a base at New Galloway in Kirkudbright. Jennet was a Scottish name. It was natural to call a daughter after her, but alongside the very English names of most of their other nine children their fourth
son was baptised Alexander; and after his death as an infant they named another son the same. It can be conjectured that they married in about 1741, for their family started in 1742, and births then came at two-yearly intervals: Thomas, William, John, Alexander I, Alexander II, Agnes, Richard, Charles and in 1758 Robert, and finally James probably in 1761 for he died in July and Jennet a few days later in August of that year.
John the parent is described variously in the register- in 1742, '44 and '46 as farmer, in '48 as yeoman, in '50 as farmer, in '52 as drover, in '54 and '56 as farmer, in '58 as freeholder, in '61 as farmer and in 1787 as grazier. He died on 1 December 1787 of Natural Decay.

The whereabouts of John and Jennet's farm and freehold are not known. But in 1762 their son John, who was apparently in the business, purchased a big house and premises (now 75-9 High Street, Skipton) fronting onto what became Caroline Square. Birtwhistle's Yard of small cottages was built on this property behind the frontage. John junior, though unmarried, at once made the big house his home and upon his death in 1792 he left the property to his elder brother William. Both died bachelors, so upon William's death in 1819 the property passed to a nephew John Birtwhistle. The Leeds Mercury of 15 May 1819 reported :-

The above information comes from the manuscript notes of Dr Geoffrey Rowley in Skipton Library. So it seems that the four sons John, William, Robert and Alexander were in business with their father and succeeded him in it; yet it is to be noted that Hurtley's comments, published a year before the father's death, speak of his tenancy of Great Close in the past tense: his were the great days of the family's involvement.

Although coming from Skipton, their cattle trading ventures led them to establish an estate in Galloway and they acquired land by the River Dee at Balmore and established themselves in the area. Alexander Birtwhisle became Provost of Kirkudbright and was described by Burns as "roaring Birtwhistle". The Industrial revolution was in progress and in a search of new business opportunities the family looked to cotton. Having been refused permission to build a mill on their Kirkudbright estate by the laird, Earl of Selkirk, in 1785 John, Thomas and William Birtwhistle struck a deal with James Murray to build a cotton mill on the western bank of the River Fleet at Gatehouse-of-Fleet. Murray formed a joint stock company with the Birtwhistles to finance the 4 storey 12 bay (120 x 30 feet) water powered mill. The Sun Fire Insurance Company valued the mill and contents at £3,600 in 1788 (buildings £1200, stock & machinery £2,400)and this provided the capital for the construction of a second, smaller mill. This mill is now a visitor centre.