Introducing this Website

This website is brought to you by the Friends of the Dales (the “brand name” of the Yorkshire Dales Society). Here you can browse through photos, memories, stories and historical information of relevance to the Yorkshire Dales area of the UK.  

The website has been developed through the Capturing the Past project, which was part of Stories in Stone, a scheme of conservation and community projects concentrated on the Ingleborough area that ran from 2016 to 2021. The scheme was developed by the Ingleborough Dales Landscape Partnership, led by Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust and supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The site comprises collections of local historical material which include photos, old documents, wills, parish records, deeds and indentures and the spoken memories of some of those privileged to have lived and worked in these upland communities.

The site is very much a “work in progress”.  Additional collections will be added over the months to come as they are catalogued and digitised, but already we can offer access to over 3,200 items (over 15,000 individual pages) of historical material, most of it not previously available to search on-line.

This is an interactive site and is intended to be a forum for sharing information about the history of the area. You can comment on items posted here and upload material that you believe will be of interest to others. The main aim is to develop over time a sense of place for  those who live and work here now, those whose roots are here and those who are simply interested in these English highlands.

Presently, most material is concerned with the heritage of the ten parishes and townships surrounding Ingleborough plus the parish of Long Preston to the east of Settle.  In due course the site will expand to include material from across the Yorkshire Dales National Park area. The parishes are:

To search the site please use the “Search Our Archive” search box on the home page. A new instruction sheet for those new to searching the site will be found here soon.

About us

This website is created by a group of volunteers working with County archivists,  local history groups and private collection owners. We’re always interested in new recruits, so if you would like to help in any way please contact us.

Contributing to the site

You can add a comment about anything on the website by clicking on the ‘Add a comment’ link at the bottom of each page. You can also submit your own photos, stories or information to the site by using our contribution form.  To see our privacy policy and how we shall use your data please go here.

What’s New

To see the latest additions to this site click here

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