IN 1751, visiting what we now know as The Yorkshire Dales, the traveller Richard Pococke was astonished to see what he called “houses built in most of the fields”. He described the spectacle as “unusual and uncommon”.

Chiefly built of wood, under a heather thatch, most of these ‘houses’ were in fact barns. They were the predecessors of the stone field barns that are now a defining feature of the Dales landscape. Altogether there are estimated to be around 6,000. Within half a mile of Muker there are about 100, some 80 or so of which are in view from a point on the Pennine Way.

How the field barn came to be such a ubiquitous feature of the Dales is lost in antiquity. But farmers there long ago found it was easier to keep livestock and the two materials most closely associated with it – hay and manure - in fields around the farm rather than at the central farmstead. Thus the barns arose, each housing a small number of cattle. Hay from the nearby fields could be led straight to the barn, where it was forked into a loft. Dung could be shovelled to a ground-floor space, to be later spread on the fields.

The late Bill Mitchell, that peerless chronicler of Dales life, was told that lads going to school were sometimes given the task of “foddering” (feeding) the cattle in the barns en route.

A Harry Cockerill, of Askrigg, recalled unconventional visits of his own. An accordion player at local dances, which sometimes went on till 3am, he foddered the cows on his way home. “I didn’t know if the moon was going to bed or the sun was getting up.”

Roofed with local slate, these unpretentious stone structures therefore speak eloquently of the evolution of the Dales and its human story. But modern farming, in which tractors and quad bikes have made operating from a central point more convenient, has rendered them redundant. So the barns, though coveted for home conversions, are falling into decay.

Not wanting sporadic development, the national park has restricted conversions to within, or close to, existing settlements. But it now looks poised to allow conversion of roadside barns, of which there are thought to be as many as 800 – more than one-in-ten.

“This should have been allowed years ago,” declares national park member John Blackie, a vigorous campaigner for local homes for local people. The Yorkshire Dales Society, passionate defender of the Dales landscape, is also said to be supportive.

But this is a very risky measure. Building restraints on conversion won’t disguise a roadside barn’s transformation into a home. Think gates, perhaps a gravel drive, flower tubs, coach lamps, kids’ plastic playthings, parked cars. There’s talk of a “conversion levy”, with £25,000 quoted for a “four- bedroomed house”. How many locals want, or could afford, a four-bedroom house?

As the Wensleydale-based author, the late Geoffrey Wright, says in his excellent book The Yorkshire Dales (1986): “It is the combination of stone barns and stone-walled fields which forms the most memorable aspect of the Dales landscape and makes it unique in Britain, possibly in Europe.” Part-realising Pococke’s vision, and passing a house where virtually every roadside barn now stands, could destroy that fundamental attraction.