Hecklers in Smelthouses

Have you heard of the Hecklers of Smelthouses? Neither had I until Amanda Brown wrote this! There was a lot of heckling in the Nidderdale hamlet of Smelthouses back in the late 1700’s.No, not from a gang of noisy protestors, but from the workers in the flax mill, known as a Manufactory, heckling the fibres using heckle combs before they were spun into fabric.

As an aside, apparently it was the women hecklers in Dundee who started a movement to improve wages and working conditions that led to the word heckling being used in politics.

So Smelthouses, a hamlet near Pateley Bridge that tends to be passed by as visitors rush to reach the National Trust site of Brimham Rocks just up the road, has its own colourful history. The name refers to its Medieval past when the Cistercian monks of Fountains Abbey created ‘Le Smeltes’ to extract iron from the ore mined at Greenhow, probably because there were plenty of trees in places like Old Spring Woods that could be coppiced and used to make charcoal for the process.

Fast forward to 1795 and the hamlet became the site for the first flax mill to be built in Nidderdale, followed by a string of similar mills as linen production was ramped up thanks to new power-driven technology that made the most of the water from the River Nidd and its tributaries. The mill burnt down in the 1800s.

Follow the Nidderdale Protected Landscape’s 7.5-mile Hartwith Heritage Trail and you can get a real sense of the dale’s heritage. This includes walking down the Monk’s route from Brimham to Smelthouses, which the monasteries created to connect and access their estates. It feels ancient as you look across through the woods to small stretches of open ground marked with haphazard boundary walls.

Through Smelthouses, stopping along the way at the tiny ‘outside-only’ café Smeltbakes for a slice of homemade cake, down the road and then a left turn takes you onto a bridleway that follows a stream towards Low Laithe. At the end of this lane you’ll see Knox Mill which began life as a flax mill, then becoming a timber and sawmill in the 1920s. On the opposite of the bridleway is Knox Hall, which stands out for its two cylindrical wings, and was built originally as two separate homes, one for the mill manager and the other for the time keeper.

Further along the walk, you go up into Braisty Woods and one of my favourites, Old Spring Wood where signs show where the charcoal was once made.