A beautiful valley hallowed by martyrs

I went for a great walk in Nidderdale today. One of the students here - upon reading my blog - mischievously averred that I seem to get about quite a lot. I don't make an apology for that. Why shouldn't a man whom Providence has placed in an area of such outstanding natural beauty make the most of it? (Plus, Monday is my day off). Nidderdale, as it happens (not that I want to take the high spiritual ground!) is also a hallowed place for Catholics. A high proportion of the martyrs from our county were resident there. If I remember rightly, the local justices in the 1570s and 1580s were very lenient, so those who held to the Old Religion carried on discreetly attending Mass in some of  the large recusant houses thereabouts. After the scare caused by the Spanish Armada in 1588, pressure was applied from London and there were mass arrests: some were tortured; some died in prison; some were executed. It is a very remote valley. Indeed, before a railway was laid for the creation of Scar House Reservoir at its head in the early twentieth century, there was just one track linking the farms and granges in Upper Nidderdale: Thrope Lane. I walked along it today in the snow. As I tramped along, happy in my thoughts, it suddenly occurred to me that this must have been the lane that the constables and soldiers took as they moved in on the hapless Catholic farmers. Did they surprise them at night? I thought. Were there simultaneous arrests to prevent some people from evading capture? Did this narrow valley, now so peaceful, echo one awful night to the sound of doors being broken down, dogs barking, shots being fired at those seeking to escape, screams and wailing? And then presumably a procession of people went along Thrope Lane in the opposite direction, many with bound hands; many, no doubt, terrified. I had stumbled upon a via crucis.

My return route took me to the narrow road that winds its way on the other side of the valley, and which is just visible on the photograph: it follows the line of the former railway, since taken up. I learnt today that work began on the railway and the reservoir, which serves Bradford, in 1921. Many of the labourers were Irish navvies and a Catholic church was built in nearby Pateley Bridge for them. I remembered that my grandparents, who were from Co Roscommon, arrived in Bradford the following year; my grandfather too was a labourer. The path took me to the village of Middlesmoor on the hill whose parish church, St Chad's, dominates the skyline. There has been a church on that site since Saxon times, I learnt; the church contains a seventh-century stone font whose rough exterior I ran my hands along. A brief history of the church on the noticeboard records how in 1606 the West Riding Justices instructed the local clergyman, the Rev'd Manson, to send them a list of all the local people who had "papist affections" and that he replied to the effect that that included just about everybody! How strange it felt, in one eight-mile walk, to experience at such close quarters these signs of the varied Catholic history of our county, a history in which I am personally bound up. With all the challenges we face today, the Catholic patrimony of Yorkshire can never be effaced: it is inscribed on the landscape and fashioned in stone.