The Village of Keasden

The picturesque village of Keasden is situated in the far Northeastern corner of Bowland, just over the Yorkshire/Lancashire boundary, it is a small hamlet consisting of little except St Matthew’s church, built in 1873, a phonebox and a scattering of farmhouses.

The name Keasden originates from ‘cheese den’, or ‘cheese valley’, as the area’s rich pastures provide good grazing for dairy cattle and once, many generations ago, most farms here made their own cheese, you can still see old stone cheese presses outside some of the farms. Sadly many of these have been sold as they go for quite a bit at a farm auction and are highly sought after as garden ornaments.

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

The old method of making cheese, very like in this clip from Victorian farm, involved much hard work to compress the Whey, or liquid, from the cheese, leaving the curds behind. Different areas of the country employed different methods to achieve this, depending on the desired consistency of the end product, in this part of Yorkshire a denser consistency of cheese was desired so more weight had to be applied to squeeze out more whey, hence the hefty stone weights on the press.

Generations of Farmers

The surnames on the war memorial outside St Matthew’s mirror those which you will find in the phone book now as many of the farms are still kept by the families which have farmed the area for many generations, names like Swindlehurst, Taylor, Wallbank, and Harrison. They can be seen in the stock books at the local auction markets too as they have been since they were founded, no doubt each of these farming families had their own cheese recipes but most of these are long forgotten.

Records from St Matthew’s and the Methodist Chapel in the village which closed in the 80’s list all of the farmhouses which exist now but also feature many more which have long since been demolished. They show that the area was once much more heavily populated and areas like Burn Moor, high above the village and with views sweeping over the Wenning valley towards Ingleborough would have been dotted with farmhouses and barns, each at the centre of their own little smallholding.

The records and surnames also tell us something about how the community functioned in the past, with occupations listed including blacksmiths, carpenters, shoemakers and weavers. Surnames such as Taylor and Smith represent some of these and other surnames such as Swindlehurst, which means ‘Swine of the wooded hill’ and Wallbank which means ‘from the river bank’ originated in this part of the country and are still very common here.

Present and future

Only around 15 of the 40 odd farms recorded in the church records, which date from the 17th century, remain now and many of these are private houses, bought by families from outside the area and at hugely inflated prices due to the area’s proximity to the Yorkshire Dales. Others are now run as Bed and Breakfasts and some, like Keasden Head Farm, have diversified into other industries as well as farming to complement their income.

The future of Keasden, like that of many other rural communities in the northern uplands is very uncertain at the moment as many of the sheep farms here were heavily subsidised through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is being gradually reformed since we left Europe. Such upheavals have been survived in the past though as hill farmers are a tough breed and can weather pretty much any storm, some have even started producing cheese again!

A B-H