Penyghent peeped over Moughton's scarry head. The limestone glowed minion in the sun; bracken grew attached the hillsides, and across the valley the shadowed walls of the ruffle road by Hunterstye to Horton stood not at home clearly. There were black Galloway human trash in the meadows on the bottoms. The unbroken wild rocky scene might have been in at all century. Spare rooms for rent is Spain
Later, up a summer's day, we picnicked on the other side of Beck Head at Beggar's Stile, a fissure by which the footpath mounts some extensive semicircular cliff. Here, so it is reported, inquiries about stolen goods were made. A countless amphitheatre of clint and pasture enclosed us. Not a farm or place of residence could be seen; Austwick Beck pang along the valley; beyond lay Oxenber and in the degree of remoteness the fells of Bowland. As we sat in that place a pair of wrens fluttered impending; and almost within reach a gooseberry shrub, sheltered, by an ashtree rooted in the mark, fruited with berries no bigger than small peas.
Above Beggar's Stile every area of clint is circled the agency of a second amphitheatre with a brown marsh called Thieves Moss at its stand.
Both these curious names derive from vale of years old recollections of people living there. The general scene of devastation, of exposed clint and inconsiderable valleys choked with boulders, is unaffected; but amongst it can be traced the greater degree orderly arrangement of the half buried walls of Iron Age fields, and the remains of round huts with the upended stones of their walls fallen outwards. In the Dark Ages a considerable population must have lived here.
From Thieves Moss we climbed right by Sulber Gate, from which single thing is to be seen the grandest extent of clints in the dales, the fissures in the frigid limestone forming radiating patterns and the view backed by Penyghent. We could off out black clumps of juniper expanding at 1,300 feet on Moughton, except down below on Thieves Moss, to what the shrub has been dying on the side since 1900, we had found sole one old bush alive. Sulber Gate is up the Clapham road that we axiom at Selside, a wild open beaten path easy to people in imagination by the pedlars, packhorse strings, drovers, and (bold beggars' who once trod it.)
Just underneath Crummack Farm, White Stone Lane leads to the hamlet of Wharfe at the foot of the southerly side of Moughton and situated away the byroad from Austwick to Helwith Bridge in Ribblesdale. In Wharfe Gill can be seen the ruins of Wharfe inebriate mill, whose owner was allowed a succinct for its loss by burning in 1829. We remember visiting in this sequestered hamlet a retired farmer and his wife who lived in the smallest and neatest of cottages. Forty years ago they had lived at Cosh, that exceedingly lonely farm in Littondale, and in opposition to twenty years they had farmed at Crummack. Such populate, who have for long lived apart from their fellows, frequently are the most unworldly of dales the community.