A Lost Swaledale Vaccary and a Palimpsest of Place-Names

Abstract

IN 1990 JOHN McDONNELL published an article 'Upland Pennine hamlets' in this journal,l basing much of his discussion of the character and origins of settlements in Swaledale (Yorks. N.R.) on medieval documentary sources notably the Lay Subsidy assessment of ·1301 and an inquisitio post mortem of 1297-98. He also referred to two vaccaries 'in Grinton township' on land granted to Bridlington Priory by Robert de Gant, who held the manorof Grinton from 1185 to 1191, noting that one of them, Frith/oc, is lost and referring to Fieldhouse and Jennings' identification of the other, Whallesheved, with Dyke House (SE 037980).2 It is the purpose of this note to argue that Whallesheved was not at Dyke House but at Low Whita (SE 001982) and that, once this identification has been made, the location of Frith/oc can be narrowed down more closely. The history of toponyms at Low Whita carries interesting implications for the understanding of place-names in Swaledale and comparable Pennine localities, and these concerns are also briefly discussed here. The general area of discussion is shown on fig. 1. It is clear that the two linear earthworks now known as the Grinton-Fremington Dykes, one of which gave its name to Dyke House, were called 'dykes', not walls, from at least the twelfth century.3 But in any case Dyke House would be an odd location for a vaccary. It is well above the medieval settlement zone in the townships of Grinton and Herthay or Hercay (now Harkerside, which in terms of surviving settlements is now represented solely by the farm at Harkerside Place SE 027984). Dyke House is marked on a map of 1774,4 and the fields around it must have been enclosed from moorland sometime before that date. Land improvement here was clearly less destructive than would have been the case in the nineteenth century; quite a number of late prehistoric cairns and walls survive well enough to be recognizable, and the axis of the main boundaries has been determined by that of the ruined walls of a coaxial land division system which covers much of the moorland of Harkerside and Grinton, and is probably of iron-age date.5 But there is no evidence that the fields around Dyke House are of medieval origin. It is unlikely that substantial outlying intakes would have been created here as early as the late twelfth century. Immediately to the west of the fields around Dyke House is the intake surrounding what is now marked on the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map as Deer Park. On the 1774 map, however, this is marked as 'Swale's Intake'. There were apparently Swales in 'West Grinton', evidently