Hubberholme, Yorkshire

A handful of houses, a Norman church with one of England's last medieval rood lofts, and the place where JB Priestley asked for his ashes to be scattered — Hubberholme is the Dales at their most elemental.

History & Significance

Hubberholme is barely a hamlet: a church, an inn, a farmhouse, and a handful of cottages in Langstrothdale at the head of upper Wharfedale in the Yorkshire Dales. The River Wharfe runs past its door. The limestone fells rise on both sides to the north and south. In winter the dale is stark and quiet; in summer it is green and traversed by walkers following the Dales Way. It is, by most measures, one of the smallest and most remote places in the county of Yorkshire.

It is also the place that JB Priestley (1894–1984), Bradford-born novelist, playwright, and essayist, described as "one of the smallest and most pleasant places in the world." When Priestley died, his ashes were scattered in the churchyard of St Michael and All Angels, in accordance with his wishes. He had known Hubberholme since boyhood, returning to it throughout his life, and the village appears in his autobiography "Instead of the Trees" (1977) as a touchstone of a certain kind of Englishness: austere, deeply rooted, indifferent to fashion.

The church he loved is worth the journey on its own terms. St Michael and All Angels retains one of only two surviving medieval rood lofts in Yorkshire — the gallery of wood that once separated the nave from the chancel in every pre-Reformation English church. Almost all rood lofts were removed or destroyed during the Reformation and subsequent centuries; the survival of the Hubberholme example, dated to 1558, is exceptional. The George Inn across the river, where Priestley drank, holds the annual Hubberholme Parliament — a candle auction of grazing rights on 16 acres of pasture that has been held in January every year for centuries.

The church of St Michael and All Angels at Hubberholme is a low, thick-walled building of Norman origin, enlarged and modified in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The building is small — the nave is perhaps twelve metres long — and constructed of the rough limestone that forms the Dales landscape. The setting, with the river on one side and the fells rising behind, makes it one of the most photographed churches in northern England.

The rood loft is the building's most significant feature. Rood lofts were the carved wooden galleries that spanned the chancel arch in medieval English churches, bearing the crucifix (rood) above and providing a platform for singers and readers. They were a standard feature of the medieval church interior and the primary decorative focus of most pre-Reformation parishes. The Reformation and subsequent Protestant iconoclasm led to the systematic removal of roods and rood lofts from English churches: the vast majority were destroyed between 1547 and 1560 under Edward VI's injunctions, or in subsequent decades under Elizabeth I.

The Hubberholme loft survives because the Reformation reached the upper Dales later and less completely than it reached the south of England. The loft is dated by dendrochronology and style to around 1558 — the very end of the Catholic Mary I's reign — which means it was built at almost the last possible moment before the Elizabethan Settlement made further Catholic construction impossible. Whether it was installed as a final act of conservative devotion or simply as a routine completion of the church's fittings is unknown. It now stands as one of the most complete survivals of its type in England.

John Boynton Priestley was born in 1894 in Bradford — then one of the great industrial cities of the north, the centre of the English wool trade — and grew up in a city whose identity was as much shaped by the moorland and Dales immediately above it as by the mills below. He left Bradford for London and eventually for international fame with plays like "An Inspector Calls" (1945) and novels like "The Good Companions" (1929), but Yorkshire remained his imaginative home.

Priestley's relationship with Hubberholme was personal and persistent. He came to the dale as a young man, returned throughout his career, and in his later writings returned to it as a symbol of the England that mattered to him — not the England of London or of the Home Counties, but the England of stone walls, peat moorland, and communities formed by the landscape rather than by fashion or money. His description of Hubberholme as "one of the smallest and most pleasant places in the world" appears in several versions across his essays and became something of a motto for the village.

His ashes are scattered in the churchyard, not marked by any stone. The George Inn across the narrow stone bridge from the church is where he ate and drank on his visits, and the inn maintains the connection proudly. The Hubberholme walk — up the dale from Buckden, along the river, to the church, and back — is one of the most walked routes in the Dales, and a significant proportion of those who make it are there partly because of Priestley.

The Hubberholme Parliament is held in the George Inn on the first Monday after Epiphany (6 January) each year. The landlord of the George acts as host; the vicar of the local benefice acts as chairman; and farmers and landowners from the dale bid for the right to graze 16 acres of poor upland pasture known as Poor Pasture. The bidding is conducted by candlelight: a candle is lit at the beginning of the auction, and the last bid entered before the candle goes out wins the grazing right.

The candle auction is a medieval practice that survives in a few places in England — Allendale in Northumberland and Tattersall's Auctioneers also use candle auction methods — but the Hubberholme Parliament gives the tradition its most elaborate institutional form. The income from the grazing let goes to the poor of the parish, as it has done since the custom was established.

Whether the tradition genuinely dates to medieval times or was codified in its current form at a later date is debated. The earliest certain documentary references are from the eighteenth century. But the practice of holding a candlelit bidding session in a Dales inn in the depths of January, for the grazing of a few acres of rough pasture, captures something essential about the continuity of Dales farming practice and community custom that drew Priestley to Hubberholme in the first place.

The valley above Hubberholme — Langstrothdale — is one of the most remote inhabited valleys in the Yorkshire Dales. The dale narrows as it rises towards the watershed with Ribblesdale on the west and Wensleydale to the north, and the farms that line the valley floor are among the most isolated farmsteads in England. The landscape is limestone and gritstone, with thin soils, rough grazing, and occasional limestone pavements that give the higher ground its characteristic ghostly quality.

Hubberholme appears in the Domesday Book under the Yorkshire survey, as one of many small settlements in the upper Wharfe and its tributaries. The area was depopulated in the Norman Harrying of the North in 1069–70 and recovered slowly over the following centuries. The scattered farmsteads of Langstrothdale reflect this re-colonisation: small intakes from the upland common, farmed by families who built their homesteads in the only positions the topography allowed.

The medieval monastic houses had significant interests in the upper Dales. Bolton Priory, a few miles downstream in Wharfedale, held estates and grazing rights across the valley. Fountains Abbey in Nidderdale ran great flocks of sheep on the Dales grazings. The landscape of Langstrothdale in the medieval period was part of a monastic agricultural economy of considerable sophistication, and the churches at Hubberholme and Buckden served the scattered pastoral communities that worked these upland estates.

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