One night in January 1973, Yorkshire TV’s switchboard went into meltdown. Most of the callers were saying exactly the same thing. “I want to send some money to help the old lady in the Yorkshire Dales. What’s the best way to do that please?”
It followed the first transmission of Too Long a Winter, a documentary about life in Baldersdale, a remote side-valley of Teesdale in the North Pennines. The star of the show was Hannah Hauxwell, a 46-year-old farmer tending a small herd of cows and living alone in an isolated farmhouse with no electricity or running water. The first shots of Hannah showed her struggling to lead a stubborn bullock through knee-deep snow, clad in ragged clothing that seemed to belong to a different century.
But what was obvious from those very first shots was that in the face of astonishing hardship, Hannah was resolute, courageous and unutterably charming. As the bullock bucked and bolted, Hannah chased after him, uttering a gentle, Teesdale-accented cry of frustration. “Oh, you little beast!”
In the scenes that followed, Hannah enchanted ITV’s viewing millions with her warmth and humility. The documentary changed Hannah’s life. Thankfully, it never changed Hannah.
‘No place for a maiden lady’
Too Long a Winter sprang from an article in the Yorkshire Post in 1970. Headlined ‘How to be happy on £170 a year’, it outlined Hannah’s frugal, near-primitive lifestyle on her lonely hillside. A researcher from Yorkshire TV followed it up and left a note on the desk of director and producer Barry Cockcroft. It read: Met this woman – good talker – might be worth a look.
Barry liked the idea, and went to meet Hannah at her lonely farmstead of Low Birk Hatt. There he persuaded Hannah to let the cameras follow her for a few days as she tended her animals, repaired walls and fences, went to a church service and pottered around the farmhouse, lit only by oil lamps. The pair formed a close bond which would last decades and transform Hannah’s life.
Even today, watching the grainy copy of Too Long a Winter on YouTube is a delight, and the bald facts of her existence are no less compelling than they were in 1973. Hannah was born at Sleetburn Farm in 1926 and moved next door to Low Birk Hatt at the age of three. Her mother, father and uncle all passed away by the time Hannah was 34, leaving her to run the farm alone.
At the time of the documentary, her herd consisted of one milking cow, two calves, and a few more cows she took in from neighbouring farms. There was no access track to the farm, meaning no vehicles could reach it. So, through both necessity and choice, Hannah Hauxwell was a walker.
At the age of 46, she had left the valley only once, for a brief stay in hospital. (Today it’s interesting that Hannah was perceived as an ‘old woman’ by viewers at the time. The hard lifestyle clearly aged Hannah before her time – but she’s also symptomatic of that broader phenomenon that as a populace, we looked older more quickly than we do today.)
She lived on a meagre income of between £250 and £280 per year (about £6000 now), depending entirely on sales of her cattle at auction. Once a month, a grocer would leave a bag on a wall a mile and a half from the farm containing Hannah’s provisions: butter, cheese, eggs, tea, sugar, lard, margarine, onions, carrots, bread, tomatoes and a tin of spam, costing a total of around £5.
“I keep expenditure down to the bare necessities,” she explained. “I put the brake on and keep it on.”
Her one ‘luxury’ was coal; expensive at £30 but “I do like a good fire”.
And there was no Mr Hauxwell. Living so remotely, Hannah barely had contact with even the closest villages, and she would never attend the cattle market because, as the narrator intones over footage of a sea of gruff men in flat caps, “it is no place for a maiden lady”. But with a mindset that seems strikingly modern, independence was alright by Hannah. “If it isn’t a success I think there can be nothing worse than being obliged to share a roof with someone you’re utterly at variance with,” she said.
The cultural impact of the programme is hard to understate. As journalist Grace Newton wrote in the Yorkshire Post recently: “The national reaction to Hannah was something of a watershed moment. Materialistic 1970s Britain – land of motorways, supermarkets, pop music, the first wave of cheap foreign package holidays – woke up to the fact that there were still people living spartan, Victorian lives in a forgotten wilderness.”
But there’s another aspect of Hannah’s life which was so far ahead of its time that its impact has only been fully appreciated in the last decade or so. Quite without knowing it, she was an extraordinary conservationist.
A walk to Hannah’s farm
“You’ve picked a good day,” says Mark Dinning.
Mark is head of conservation for Durham Wildlife Trust, and he and colleague Kate English have joined Tom and I for a walk into Hannah Hauxwell’s beloved Baldersdale. It’s a crisp winter’s afternoon, and the wind is whipping the water off Blackton Reservoir into little cyclones. Under the low sun, the meadows are a fresh green that belies the fact it’s December, while the moors beyond are turning saffron. It is indeed a banger of a day.
For a split second it feels disappointing, given that most of the filmed footage of Hannah Hauxwell depicts a bleak, stark landscape under a permanent shroud of snow and muck. Is it supposed to look this nice? The thought soon goes. Yes it is. Hannah would have seen many beautiful days like this as well as those dark and bitter ones.
Back when Too Long a Winter was first screened, this valley was in Yorkshire. The following year it got shunted into County Durham, hence us spending the day with Durham Wildlife Trust (durhamwt.com), which today owns and manages a large area of Hannah’s farmland. Mark has planned a route that will take us along the reservoir and up to Low Birk Hatt. Then we’ll cross the dale and explore the upland to the west, getting a chance to look down over the remote world in which Hannah lived, worked and walked.
“As a landscape, what we’re looking at hasn’t changed all that much from what Hannah would have known back in the 60s and 70s,” says Mark.
“What’s changed is the use of the landscape, and of course feeding into that is our understanding of conservation. Which, unintentionally, Hannah was fantastic at.”
Hannah farmed traditionally, never using mechanisation, pesticides, herbicides or fertilisers. While the rest of post-war Britain sought to maximise yield and profit with precious little thought for sustainability, Hannah’s labours ensured that today, her meadows are a time capsule showing what happens when you manage a meadow like it’s 1926.
“Hay meadows have diminished by about 97% since the Second World War, so upland hay meadows like the ones at Hannah’s farm are exceptionally rare, as are the plant communities we find in them,” says Mark.
“Hannah would just have seen it as normality, and yet she was nurturing a vastly rich assemblage of plants, herbs and grasses that would be the envy of any conservation project in the world.”
The large field directly behind the farmhouse is now known as Hannah’s Meadow, and the Wildlife Trust has established a two-mile walking trail to show off its richness and explain how the tradition continues today. It includes a small barn, now filled with beautifully illustrated information panels and traditional farming implements, some of which were used by Hannah herself.
“We do our best to replicate exactly what Hannah did, if we can be forgiven for using a few tractors and balers,” says Mark, casting an eye at Hannah’s antique scythe on the wall.
“The cycle starts with the hay cut at the end of July, by which time the wildflowers have had a chance to set seed for next year. The hay goes to feed livestock over the winter, the field is ‘shut up’ for a few weeks, then sheep and cattle are introduced to graze down the growth. That allows the field to be in the perfect condition to be shut up again in March, when the grasses and wildflowers can start to grow through once again.”
Obviously winter isn’t the best time to see wildflowers, but visit Hannah’s Meadow in summer and you’ll enjoy a raucous parade of red clover, wood cranesbill, meadowsweet, buttercup, pignut, yellow rattle, birdsfoot trefoil and a whole host more. As well as looking gorgeous, they attract an array of insect and invertebrates, which in turn provide food for birds and mammals. It is a perfect habitat, nurturing humans, livestock and wildlife through each turn around the sun.
When this was explained to her in later life, Hannah said: “I used to look at things and think how bonny the wildflowers were, what nice colours. But I was never aware of their variety or rarity.”
‘Be what you are’
Later in the day, we’re up on the wild western wall of the dale. Our target is Goldsborough, one of several prominent flat-topped hills which stand sentinel around Baldersdale. The ‘borough’ tells us it was once a hill-fort, like the infinitely more famous Ingleborough way over in Ribblesdale. The sun is going down, ensuring that Goldsborough lives up to its name. The view across to Low Birk Hatt is extraordinary, and far away to the north-west, the snow-capped dollop of Mickle Fell looks like a giant’s Viennetta.
I have no evidence that Hannah came to this specific place and saw her home from afar, but we do know that she found time to walk for her own enjoyment.
“I am attached to this lovely countryside,” she said in Too Long a Winter.
“I love to go for a walk. I’ve stopped in places and thought, ‘if I’ve nothing in my pocket, this is the one thing nobody can rob me of. It’s mine’.”
Hannah continued to live and farm at Low Birk Hatt through to the winter of 1988 when, at the age of 62, ill health finally forced her to sell up and move to a cottage in Cotherstone, four miles down the dale. She lived comfortably in the village for more than 20 years. The farmhouse was purchased privately, while Durham Wildlife Trust was able to buy a large tranche of her farmland.
The programme, of course, changed Hannah’s life. She became perhaps Britain’s most unusual celebrity, hailed as the First Lady of the Dales. In 1988, she teamed up with Barry Cockcroft for a follow-up documentary, A Winter Too Many. It featured her famous line ‘in summer, I live; in winter, I exist’ and covered her heartbreaking decision to leave the farm. But it also showed her joyous visit to London, where she was guest of honour at the 1989 Women of the Year gala.
In the 90s, the pair made two series of Innocent Abroad, in which Hannah toured first Europe and later the USA. She even got her own episode of This is Your Life. In our house, my parents were slightly obsessed with Hannah. Her book Daughter of the Dales was rarely off the coffee table.
In 2011, she appeared on Yorkshire TV’s Calendar programme for a retrospective on her life, and she was still coming out with absolute zingers. “I’ve no time for pretenders. My mother always said, if you be what you are, you’ll always be on firm ground.”
Hannah passed away on 30th January 2018, at the age of 91. Today, in addition to the tributes at Hannah’s Meadow, a blue plaque adorns her cottage in Cotherstone. Her grave, marked by a granite boulder in the quiet cemetery just north of beautiful Romaldkirk, is a place of pilgrimage for many.
(It also has the additional benefit of the Rose & Crown Inn, one of the most truly unique and special places we’ve ever stayed, as photographer Tom suggests here.)
If you carry only one image of Hannah Hauxwell, it’s probably the one of her struggling through the snow on a bleak, blustery evening, while mournful music plays in the background. But while her life was undeniably hard, it was also profoundly joyful. And thanks to Hannah’s Meadow, her story is as relevant in summer as it is right now. Of the view from her farm gate, she said: “That’s the picture I see every day, and I will never tire of it.”
Come walking here for even just a day, and you might just agree.