Many of England have benefited scholars whose researches, over many years dominate the study of their chosen region, yet few regions have been dominated to quite the same extent as the Northern Pennines, and particularly the Yorkshire Dales, was by Arthur Raistrick. Raistrick lived and worked for most his life in Northern England, from c. 1930 to 1991 making his home in the Yorkshire Dales village of Linton. Between 1925 and 1987 he published 330 books, papers and notes, yet the word landscape does appear in the title of any of them. How then does he stand as a founder of landscape studies.

Arthur Raistrick was in Saltaire in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1896 His father, an engineer, was a founder of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), formed in nearby Bradford, shortly before Arthur was born. He Went to elementary school in Shipley before gaining a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School from 1908 to 1912. He became an apprentice at Shipley Electricity works until 1925 when instead of accepting a reserved occupation, he observed strict pacifist outlook of the ILP and refused to take part in activities which could be connected with the war effort. After spending some months attending pacifist meetings and tramping round West Yorkshire with his uncle, he was arrested, court-martialled and imprisoned, first at Wormwood Scrubs along with his uncle and other Bradford objectors, and then Durham Goal, until 191. During this period he joined the Society of Friends, an act which was to have a profound impact on his life, both spiritually and as an inspiration for some of his research.

Raistrick secured a place at the University of Leeds in 1920, taking civil engineering as a first degree and then gaining a PhD in Geology. As a conscientious objector he was at first unemployable but was able to carry out research, initially in the effects of glaciation but increasingly into coal mining, spending much of 1925 and 1926 working in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coal fields, His first contact with adult education was as a student, initially at Shipley and then with (Society of) Friends Adult School in Skipton, by 1922 he was taking classes for the Workers Educational Association (WEA) and the Leeds University Extension Committee in Skipton, initially on the ‘Natural and General History of Craven’ and later a detailed study of Skipton itself. The latter resulted in ‘Skipton – A Study in Site Value’ (Raistrick and Raistrick 1930). Here he and his wife, Elizabeth, consider the town’s location and geological background, its foundation and historical development, particularly its development as an industrial town in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finish with a discussion of its contemporary traffic problems.

He was appointed as a lecturer in geology to Armstrong (later Kings) College. Newcastle, then part of the University of Durham and now the University of Newcastle in 1929. While at Armstrong College, Raistrick also gave numerous Saturday afternoon and evening classes for miners, particularly for miners working for deputy certificate qualifications and, in the late 1930’s and from 1946 to 1949, on the ‘Industrial Development of Tyneside’. He remained at Newcastle until the Second World War when as a conscientious objector he again refused to have anything to do with the war effort. Suspended without salary, he returned to Linton to live in a barn he had converted with Elizabeth.

Raistrick’s understanding of geological processes underpins his work on landscapes but it was a mining engineer and geologist that he spent most of his professional career. He was pioneer of the use of palynology to understand the development of peat and what it could tell about the vegetation history of an area, collaborating and Katherine Blackburn and Thomas Woodhead in the pollen analysis of peats in various locations in Northern England. A series of papers on the subject (e.g, Raistrick and Blackburn 1931) appeared shortly after Erdtman’s paper on the Cleveland Hills (Naturalist 1927, 39—46). The techniques he developed in the study of peat enabled him to treat and use pollen spores from fossil plants fur the identification and matching of coal seams. This work, published during the 1930’s showed distinct pollen and spore types to be present in coal. Crucially, he showed that the same seam from different collieries had similar proportions of those fossils whilst adjacent seams were clearly different. This still provides the best method for correlating coal seams and gained him international recognition.

After the war he was awarded a Fellowship to the Quaker foundation, Woodbrooke College, before returning Kings College in 1946. As well as Lecturing on civil engineering to geologists and geology to civil engineers, for 12 years Raistrick also lectured on Landscape design and on materials to the Department of Town and Country Planning and Architecture at Newcastle (Raistrick n.d.)

He retired from the University of Durham in 1956 but continued as an extra mural teacher, principally for Leeds University, the Field Studies Council and the WEA, and to carry out fieldwork and write. The heavy involvement in extra-mural teaching is something Raistrick shared with many younger leading exponents and pioneers in landscape history including Chris Taylor, Peter Fowler, Trevor Rowley and Mick Aston. Raistrick’s series of week long Residential classes at the Field Studies Council Centre at Malham Tarn House on various subjects connected with the Dales landscape between 1949 and 1946 led to many of the sites he examined and published notes on being subsequentlv scheduled.

Before the introduction of the Monuments Protection Programme, just under 25 per cent of the scheduled ancient monuments in the Yorkshire Dales National Park were in the two parishes of Malham and Malham Moor – a direct result of his work (Figure 2). Malham provides a link with another pioneer of Landscape studies. William Hoskins, who Beresford notes, frequently appeared as a guest lecturer at the Malham Tarn House courses, Perhaps revealingly, in his personal copy of West Riding of Yorkshire in the Making of an English Landscape series Raistrick annotated Hoskin’s “Editor’s Introduction” with ‘not quite the pioneer he claims to be’ (Raistrick 1970; Anon n.d.) While an assistant lecturer in economics at Bradford Technical College, Hoskins had attended Raistrick’s classes in local archaeology. Professor Maurice Beresford, who like Raistrick had been an appointed member on the West Riding Yorkshire Dales National Park Committee was unable to corroborate with Hoskins a comment Raistrick made to him that his classes had helped to set William (Hoskins) off towards the Making of the English Landscape (Hoskins 1933; Beresford 1992,213). Hoskins thesis – considered revolutionary by some was that the origins of the existing landscape were not, as generally thought, almost entirely a product of the eighteenth century but far, far older.

However, readers of Raistrick’s Malham and Malham Moor, for example (Raistrick 1947) would have had no illusions about this part of the Dales landscape being mainly a product of the eighteenth century. Raistrick’s early Dalesman articles (packhorse ways, dewponds, forests, drystone walls, vernacular buildings – several of which are reproduced in Joy 1991) provide a wider link into the time depth of the Dales landscape, some dealing in more detail with the landscape topics raised throughout his earlier Linton in Craven: A study of a Pennine Dales Parish (1938). The Dalesman articles suggest the range of sources he was using in his study of the landscape, place-names and historical documents supplementing the results of fieldwork and understanding of geology and geomorphology. Early papers include an analysis of the 1379 poll tax for Craven (Raistrick 1929) while the deeds and other documents he collected for much of his life form a lasting legacy in the archives of Skipton reference library, the J.B Priestley library at the University of Bradford and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. His discussion of Yorkshire Maps and Map-Makers (Raistrick 1969, but based on articles published twenty years earlier in The Dalesman) remains a valuable reference source.

The true North Country man would feel that something vital was taken from the landscape if the intricate pattern of grey or brownish black walls, the deep velvety lines of shadow that they cast and the brilliance of their sunlit tops, were missing. The lovely rounded contours of the Cheviots, the gaunt mountains of much of Scotland, seem at first sight strangely familiar and yet strangely different to the visitor from the Dales; the fells and the moorland tops, the streams and gorges, are all familiar, but the absence or rarity of walls dividing up the wide expanse of a country rob the views of a familiar pattern and texture which seems a natural part of the Pennine slopes.

When was this pattern of walls superimposed on our countryside? Who built the walls, why and how (Raistrick 1946)

His answer to these questions remains an important study on walls, although limited, like much of Raistrick’s work, by being written for a lay audience and his belief that this audience was not interested in sources of information or quotations. Only in the last few years has the subject advanced much beyond his pioneering study (eg Wildgoose 1991; Dennison in press; Lord in Press).

‘… the Norsemen spread into the highland areas and their language is spread over the features of the topography. The shepherd wandered over more and rougher country than the plowman, and the detail of rock and crag, moor and swamp were of an urgent importance to him. This detailed naming has become part of the ordinary speech of the west, and in the Lake District, Cumberland, and the west Pennines, fells and gills, mosses and becks, crags and clints and a hundred other words of Norse affinity are in use today without any thought of dialect, or any idea but that they are the ordinary and correct descriptive terms.’ {Raistrick 1968 80).

His papers on building stones and quarries reflected his interest in geology. His discussion of the buildings they made initially as a series of Dalesman Articles and then as a book, remains the most comprehensive book on the buildings Of the Dales (Raistrick 1976). Examination of buildings went further than description: the collaboration with Oliver Gilbert on Malham Tarn House discusses not just its architectural history and building materials but its micro-climate colonisation by plants and their influence on the weathering process, a topic which links back to his professional analyses of microspores in coal (Raistrick and Gilbert 1963).

Rastrick’s pleasure in field work is suggested by a footnote in his Industrial Archaeology regarding the landscape of the South Yorkshire Ironmasters. To check scores of miles of these tracks and to visit the remains of all the furnaces and forges took hours of walking and more happy hours and healthy exercise between 1922 and 1938 than and one can enumerate but such effort is indeed good training in industrial archaeology (Raistrick 1972 733 2).

One tool of landscape studies which Raistrick appears to have little used was aerial photography, a surprising omission in view of the recognition of O.G.S. Crawford’s work referred to in his 1929 Antiquity paper on lynchets (Raistrick and Chapman 1929): Crawford’s seminal paper on Air Survey and Archaeology (1923) is amongst the papers from Raistrick’s library at Ironbridge). This may have been partly due to comparative scarcity of archaeological aerial photography in the north of England until the work of Derrick Riley in the mid 1970s. However, Raistrick noted that the examination of the air photos taken of the Grassington field system in 1932 reveal no main feature that had nor already mapped by methods outlined above (field survey including work in drought and light snow conditions) though in many places they confirm and establish detail only mapped with great difficulty on the ground (Raistrick 1937 167), Interestingly the published paper states the photos were obtained from Crawford, then Archaeology Officer for the Ordnance Survey, although a note in the Harland papers suggest that some 1932 aerial photographs of Craven were taken by Air Ministry because of Raistrick’s friendship with the then minister, a result of his involvement with the ILP (Harland mss). The survey of the Grassington field system was updated in 1964 with a collaborative Air-Machine Survey by the Ordnance Survey which Had as its main product a 1:2500 scales transcription with detailed annotations mainly by Raistrick.

At this time he was one of the honorary archaeological correspondents for the Ordnance Survey, covering most of the Dales area. Crawford had introduced the correspondent system which was revived and considerably expanded after 1947. The correspondents were supplied with six-inch maps and requested to help the Archaeology Division of the Ordnance Survey record the discovery of new archaeological sites and small finds by annotating the maps. These were returned to the Ordnance Survey on a periodic basis or when the maps of an area were being revised. Notes were normally made in ink in the margins of the sheet with leaders linking them to the appropriate place on the map Raistrick later annotated his own maps in a similar manner. The information he produced forms the basic record for many of the archaeological sites noted by the Ordnance Survey in the Dales area and his maps, most of which are now in the Raistrick Special Collection at the University of Bradford, the fullest record of his activities (Figure 3).

As an archaeologist one can criticize Raistrick for failing to publish many of the sites he investigated, even though on the shallow limestone soils of Craven his excavation technique appears to have been largely limited to the stripping off the turf and nettles from amongst the stones to reveal the plan of the enclosure or building which can then be surveyed (Raistrick and Holmes 1962, 75). The process eschewed the recording of stratigraphy and implied that buildings were largely if not entirely of one phase – subsequent work in the Dales such as Andrew Fleming’s excavation of a Romano—British settlement at Healaugh where examination of one hut revealed at least three phases of stone building and a timber antecedent (Fleming 1998) making one wonder how many of Raistrick’s excavations were of multi-phase buildings.

The limited excavation approach does have a potential benefit in that it is likely to have left some stratigraphy undisturbed for future excavators although it is often difficult to distinguish what is an undisturbed part of a site and What is partial reconstruction after investigation, details which are not always clear even on his planned sites. However, not all his interventions were limited to turf removal: the 1971 excavation of a tilery at Rylstone (1977 plate 8B) suggests rather more extensive intervention yet this photograph and eight lines in the Yorkshire Archaeological Register (Moorhouse 1973, 208) form the published record of this project. For many sites the only record of excavation is a brief annotation on one of his 6 inch or 25 inch maps. The possible existence of work on some of these was noted in print in the Yorkshire Archaeological Register for 1964. Herman Ramm listed some 42 sites surveyed or excavated by Raistrick but noted in his introduction that this year the register includes a large number of entries by Dr Raistrick who has selected the more important sites which he has surveyed mainly in the last three years but including some earlier ones. Dr Raistrick writes that he has examined some 250 sites in W Yorkshire and has surveyed nearly 100 of them in the last few years a phenomenal achievement!’ (Ramm 1965, 315)

At a different level Raistrick’s impact on studies of the cultural landscape of the Dales may have negative; it is noticeable that in the 1960s and 1970s, with the exception of Alan King, there was very little other fieldwork or research into the Dales landscape. It is not clear whether this was because Raistrick’s output suggested that there were there few important discoveries to be made or because potential researchers were unwilling to risk conflict with such a dominating figure. From the 1970s Derrick Riley’s aerial photographs showed the extent of the field systems and settlements in the Craven Dales but this was not much further until the development of the Yorkshire Dales Mapping Project by Royal Commission on Historical monuments in 1989 1992. The amount of information which can be revealed when this rapid survey is followed up by detailed field work has been demonstrated by Horne and Macleod in a recent article in LANDSCAPES (Horne and Macleod 2001)

Raistrick was a pioneer in study of industrial landscapes and processes, again a study initially linked to his geological and engineering training. Notes on Lead Mining and Smelting in West Yorkshire was the first of over 38 books, papers and notes he published on the Lead Industry (Raistrick 1927). Like much of his work some of the models he and espoused and formulated have not stood the test of time and have been overturned by more recent scholars (cf Raistrick 1955; 1975; Gill 2001: Roe 2003) but for many areas they remain the key text.

His earlv investigations of lead mining in Yorkshire led directly to a detailed study the London Lead company, a Quaker company which dominated much of the lead industry in the Northern Pennines, first published when he was president of the Friends Historical Society (Raistrick 1938b) His, Fellowship at Woodbrooke led to a study of other Quaker industrialists: Quakers in Science and Industry (1959). Whilst at Woodbrooke, Raistrick met various members of the Darby and Cadbury families who encouraged him to pursue his studies into Coalbrookdale and people within Allied Ironfounders Ltd. who enabled access to archive material still held by the company and eventually sponsorship of Dynasty of Ironfounders: the Darbys and Coalbrookedale. first published in 1955. This chronicled the significance of the industrial development of Shropshire. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and led to what is now the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. Without Rastrick’s research the Coalbrookedale furnace would have been demolished, not excavated. It now forms the heart of the Museum which like Saltaire, Rastrick’s birthplace, is now part of a World Heritage Site. Raistrick was a founder member of the Iron Gorge Museums Trust and honorary curator of the first museum on site.

Ironbridge was not the first museum he had helped found. He was a member of the committee, in part based around people who had attended his classes, which lobbied the Skipton Rural District Council to form the Craven Museum in 1928 and was instrumental in acquiring, archaeological, geological and mining related material for its collections. He also played a role in on-site preservation, being one of the original members of the Earby Mines Research Group, a small band of volunteers who conserved several landmarks of the lead industry  of the Yorkshire Dales including the smelt mill chimneys of Grassington and Malham. The photographic record of a 1964 Malham tarn Field Studies Centre course on ‘Pennine Mines and Minerals’ shows him directing course members in the conservation of the small stone slab bridge which linked Braithwaite smelt mill and peat store in Gunnerside Gill, Swaledale, now used by the Coast to Coast path (Butterfield coll)

Industrial archaeology: An Historical Survey was one of the few books Raistrick wrote which had more than a regional remit. It is one of the seminal works on the subject. not least his insistence that industrial archaeology should be more than the study of the sites and processes of the Industrial Revolution. ‘Where does the industrial archaeologist, busy measuring, photographing, recording the rows of small industrial houses in a textile town differ from the social historian or the architectural student of town and housing development {Raistrick 1972 7 -or, one might add, thinking of Skipton (Raistrick and Raistrick (1930), the student of urban landscapes). ‘Industrial archaeology must be an integration of man at work with the tools, structures and materials with which he works and the immediate environment in which his work is done’ (Raistrick 1972, 13), a contrast to many contemporary practitioners’ concentration on the sites of the Industrial Revolution. It is significant that his attempt to formulate a logical order of subject matter of the industrial archaeology forms the basis of the industrial surveys commissioned by English Heritage as part of the Monuments Protection Programme (Stocker 1995, 107).

Rastrick’s position as a conscientious objector in both world wars meant that he was by no means an Establishment figure but he played an active role in national organisations which accorded with his belief of the importance of the countryside and particularly ‘the natural beauty and solitude of the dales and mountains as a resource to be enjoyed and treasured’ (Raistrick 1968, 216). These included serving as President of the Ramblers Association, Vice-president of the Youth Hostels Association and President of the Holiday Fellowship. He had used the Holiday Fellowship guest house at Frogmore in Derbyshire. As a base during some of this mining studies in the 1920’s and is reported as meeting his wife, Elizabeth, on one holiday Fellowship holiday. He renewed his involvement with the organisation after her death and his 1973 presidential address noted that ‘the organization had started in a very small way, one man leading a few others in the country to learn the joy of exploring natural beauty on foot the sheer joy walking’ (Raistrick 1973, 7) an activity in which he himself excelled his in his enthusiastic followers in the Dales testify. He was a firm believer in the right of lovers and students of open country to wander freely over it and relished passing on his enjoyment and knowledge. ‘Throughout his life a walk with him encouraged countless people to savour his own deep sense of what can be discovered and of the things to puzzle over in almost any patch of country and of the spiritual refreshments to be gained there’ (Harland 1991).

He was an active campaigner for the maintenance of the rights of way network. Tom Stephenson, the first Secretary of the Ramblers Association who is best remembered for his championing and founding of the Pennine Way, was a personal friend who had also been imprisoned in Block A of Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector during the First World War. Raistrick collaborated with him on the routing of the northern part of the Pennine Way.

Raistrick’s involvement with national parks predated the 1949 National Parks And Access to the Countryside Act. John Dower, whose report National Parks In England and Wales (Dower 1945), commissioned by the Ministry of Town and country Planning paved the way for the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside act, was another personal friend. Dower was also a Quaker and Raistrick worked with him at Kirkby Malham on the issues which were presented in the Dower report (Ironbridge mss RS107040). Raistrick later became a Member of the Standing Committee on the National Parks, the independent lobbying group which campaigned for national parks. He was an appointed member to the Yorkshire Dales National Park Planning Committee of West Rising county Council from its inception in 1954 until 1972 and the North Riding and West Riding Dales Yorkshire Dales Joint Planning Committee. Like many other left leaning appointed members he was not re-appointed to the 1972 National Park Committee. The West Riding County Council was dominated by Councillors from urban and mining areas but Here Raistrick’s background as a member of the ILP and his professional involvement in the coal mining industry (he claimed to have been down over 700 mines} led political weight to his conservationist beliefs. He frequently appeared at public enquiries on behalf of amenity groups objecting to mineral Extraction and his concerns about over exploitation of the countryside and national parks, views expressed over thirty years ago in The Pennine Dales still hold true today:

A major part of his legacy, equal to the extensive series of meticulously hand-annotated maps of the Yorkshire Dales, particularly the Craven area which plot physical evidence for cultural activity, is his prolific output of popular articles and books over more than 60 years. A few have been noted above but the breadth of Raistrick’s writing is astonishing: the titles listed by Croucher (1995) include 57 publications on geology, 53 on archaeology, 38 on the lead industry, 24 on other aspects of industrial archaeology, 14 on buildings, 45 on historical themes and 35 on geographical themes. These figures exclude articles he wrote for the Craven Herald newspaper which brought the study of the Dales landscape to an even wider, if local, audience. His words continue to encourage visitors to the Dales and the Northern Pennines to look at, recognise and appreciate the geological and cultural processes that have shaped the landscape.

Raistrick was a passionate, multi-talented man of exceptional ability who brought his detailed understanding of geological principles to the study of cultural landscapes pioneered the use of palynology and the study of industrial landscapes, freely shared his knowledge with wide audiences and was an unflinching campaigner for the preservation of sites and landscapes and access to the countryside. While the word landscape may not appear in any of the titles of his publications. the subject and study of landscapes dominated his work and his legacy to us.