Museums and Galleries

Swaledale Folk Museum

The Green, Reeth, North Yorkshire DL11 6QT

Tel: 01748 884118

website: www.swaledalemuseum.org

The Swaledale Folk Museum was opened in 1974, and is based in the old Methodist School, which took its first pupils in 1836. It is a fascinating repository of over 1,000 objects connected with living and working in the Dale. If you want to learn about lead miniing this is the place for you, where lead and its associated rocks, minerals and fossils were yielded up by the hard labour of the miners. You can see the tools they used, trace their progress through the landscape via nineteenth century maps, and imagine what it must have been like to work underground with only candlelight for a guide.

Sheep farming been the mainstay of Swaledale agriculture since Tudor Times. As a thriving community the Dale was also home to many skilled trades and crafts; tinsmithing, joinery and stonemasonry, all represented in the Museum. While work was hard outside, it was no less easy inside. There are displays of domestic equipment from washing tubs and dollies to early electric irons.

Keeping the house clean, and the family fed was a labour intensive job, but did not preclude time for entertainment. The strange iron spring with a spike is for playing knurr & spell. There are nineteenth century quoits, and a whole section on the local brass and silver bands. There are many old photographs, which show Reeth as it was in the early twentieth century, and faces that are still familiar.

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