The mysterious Powder House in Arkengarthdale

Standing proud in its landscape, splendid in its isolation, it is near a footpath which drops steeply down to Arkle Beck. It demands investigation – why-ever is it there?

A black and white picture of it (above) appeared in Memories 539, among a selection of mystery pictures, and Paul Ryman, Tom Peacock and Mason Scarr were among those who located as being the Old Powder House near the CB Yard, where the road along the bottom of Arkengarthdale is met by the road that has climbed over The Stang from Barnard Castle.

And this building takes us back to a time when this quiet corner of the Dales was a hive of industry and alive with noise.

Behind it is a triangle of houses that are called CB Yard, which was the administrative centre of leadmining in the dale. In the field beyond it was an octagonal smelt mill which was the largest building in the dale, and, running up the daleside as far as the eye can see, is a scar of fallen stones that were once Yorkshire’s longest chimney.

The Bathurst family owned the rights to the lead of Swaledale from 1656 – the CB Yard, and the nearby CB Inn, were named after Charles Bathurst.

But after four generations, in 1800, the Bathursts’ estate was inherited in three portions by three daughters. As women weren’t allowed to own property, their husbands took control, and leased the mining rights to a Newcastle company.

The octagonal smelt Mill near CB Yard in Arkengarthdale which fell down in the 1940s and 1950s

In 1803, the company built an octagonal smelt mill next to the CB Yard, to which it was connected by a tramway. The mill had walls 27 inches thick, and at its heart were six ore hearths – furnaces where the lead ore mined in the dales was heated until the molten lead ran out, leaving the impurities behind.

This mill could produce 75 tons of lead a week.

The mill was fired by peat, dug on the nearby moors, and its bellows were pumped by a 30ft waterwheel turned by water channelled into a viaduct as it ran down the daleside into the Arkle Beck.

But heating the ore caused it to give off toxic fumes – sulphur dioxide and vaporised lead – that were deadly to man and his animals, so a flue ten metres wide was built to take them away. It ran from the mill under the road that runs from Reeth to Tan Hill and 714 metres up the side of the dale.

Looking through the remains of the new smelt mill, with the remains of Yorkshire's longest flue on the left, towards CB Yard. The old powder house is isolated in the field on the right and in the trees on the far right is Scar House

So this one corner of the dale contained all the elements of the lead industry, particularly as in 1804, in a separate field, a hexagonal powder house – our curious survivor – was built. It was where the gunpowder and dynamite used in the leadmines was stored and it was hexagonal because it was believed that the six sides would somehow help in the event of an explosion. However, just to make sure, it was located away from all the other buildings, and even fuses were kept elsewhere in CB Yard.

After 21 years, the lease ran out, and a new company built a new smelt mill just over the road from the octagonal one. It plugged its flue into the old one which it extended to the top of the dale at Moulds Side. This chimney was 1,470 metres long, the longest in Yorkshire.

The remains of the new smelt mill, built in the 1820s in Arkengarthdale

It is now collapsed, but you can still make out its course as it climbs the dale: a rubble path of stones that enables you to imagine the enormous effort that its construction must have taken, and to think of the small boys who were sent scrabbling up its insides to scrape off the lead that had condensed onto its stone linings.

Indeed, imagination is needed to make any sense of the leadmining remains in this part of Arkengarthdale. The new mill operated until 1901, and now only one of its walls survives on a site that is covered in clinker.

The 1803 octagonal mill collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s and now only its foundations survive.

The workshops and offices of CB Yard have been converted into residences but, best of all, the enigmatic powder house, nearly 220 years old, still stands in splendid isolation, surrounded by sheep, fearing an explosion that has never come.

The old powder house in Arkengarthdale with Scar House in the trees behind

OFTEN caught in the same camera frame as the Old Powder House is a mansion on the opposite bank of the Arkle Beck. With its pointed attic rooflines and tall chimneys, it looks like the setting for a Gothic horror movie as it rises out of the trees.

It is Scar House, built beneath Langthwaite Scar, in 1845 by the Gilpin-Brown family who gradually bought up the Bathurst daughters’ three shares of the leadmining estate.

The last of the Gilpin-Browns was George, who died in 1889, and after him the house was bought by Lt-Col Guy Greville Wilson, from Hull. His family had once been the world’s largest private shipowners, and he fought in the Boer War before becoming MP for Hull.

A colourful character, he used the house as a shooting lodge, living most of the year in London where, it is said, he acquired “fallen women” for his friend, the Duke of Wales (later Edward VII). Wilson’s gambling debts caught up with him in the mid-1930s, and he was forced to sell Scar House.

Tommy Sopwith, the pioneering aviator who owned Scar House in Arkengarthdale

The purchaser was Sir Thomas Sopwith, an equally extraordinary character. Aged ten, a shotgun that was lying on his lap went off and killed his father, who ran Spanish leadmines. This incident haunted Thomas for the rest of his life, but his large inheritance enabled him to throw himself into a life of sport: ballooning, sailing, motoring, ice hockey playing and flying.

In 1910, he set an endurance record for flying 169 miles, which won him a prize of £4,000. With his winnings, he set up an aviation company which built Sopwith Camels – the First World War’s most successful aircraft.

He only visited Arkengarthdale once a year for a shooting party, although he employed several permanent staff, including a gamekeeper. Despite the infrequence of the visits, his wife, Lady Sopwith, is said to have taken against neighbouring Eskeleth Hall which interfered with her views and so she had it demolished – today, just an elegant curved gateway remains leading to the overgrown site of the lost hall.

But this place is full of stories: it is also said that Sir Thomas flew into the dale in a Sopwith Camel which he landed in front of Scar House – he must have skilfully avoided the trees.

Sir Thomas died in 1989 and now Scar House is apparently owned by the Duke of Norfolk, who still uses it for shooting parties.