I love the Yorkshire Dales and the people that live there. I admire them for their bluntness. If you want to know your short­comings, you won’t find more helpful people anywhere. I lived for eight years in Malhamdale, and hardly a day passed when some crusty Dalesman didn’t take time to help me identify one or more of my deficiencies.

I love and miss Malhamdale, but decided now, for the sake of novelty, to visit some parts of the Dales I was less familiar with and so headed to Dentdale. Insofar as Dentdale is known at all, it is as one of the principal locations of the celebrated Settle-to-Carlisle railway line, which may be both the most aesthetic and the most wonderfully redundant railway line ever built in England. It was conceived sometime in the 1860s by James Allport, general manager of the Midland Railway, who wanted a route to Scotland. The only possible way was through the Pennine Hills, through seventy-two miles of landscape so irregular and deeply folded as to be an engineer’s nightmare. The project required fourteen tunnels and twenty-one viaducts, several of the latter quite enormous. Surely none of this could ever be economic. Indeed, when it dawned on Allport and his colleagues what a mad project it was, they applied to Parliament for permission to pull out of the project but Parliament sadistically refused to grant it.

Allport appointed a young engineer named Charles Sharland to get the line built. Sharland slept in a waggon and often worked for hours in drenching rains or driving snow. Even more remarkably, he did all this while suffering acutely from tuberculosis. Inevitably, it caught up with him and, with his work almost finished, he retired to Torquay at the age of just twenty-five. He passed on soon afterwards, never having seen a train run on the line he helped to create.

The line opened in 1876, and from its beginning it was a magnificent folly. For practical reasons it didn’t even go terribly near many of the communities it was built to serve. Kirkby Stephen station is a mile and a half from the village of Kirkby Stephen. Dent station is four miles from, and a steep six hundred feet above, Dent village.

British Rail later spent years trying to close the line, and did succeed in running it down to almost nothing. Dent station was closed for sixteen years and many of the others received only minimal attention. Today, however, the line is a model of what you can do with a little intelligent management and marketing.