Bare House

I don’t really know what I expected from a place listed on maps as ‘Bare House’, but apparently the name is quite literal—there’s really nothing much to see inside as the building has long since been emptied of anything interesting. Bar the built-in range, and iron fireplace there’s not much else of note, apart from a few stray ovine limbs strewn throughout the lower floors from cattle searching for a suitable place to default to dust.

Bare House is situated near the small town of Grassington, just West of the tiny hamlet of Yarnbury which was once somewhat of a hub for the 19th century lead mining operations that lie sprawled out across the scarred landscape of the moor here, and though it’s hard to find much in the way of history about the place, I did come across a single, solitary reference to a miner called ‘Thomas Coates’ who lived and worked here in 1720 — but after that, the historic fog rolls over and I can’t find any freely available census data from the region that might prove useful in building a bigger picture of the dwelling’s former occupants.

The building has obviously undergone some form of partial restoration in more recent times, and gradually repurposed as a barn and storage space: the entirety of the roof looks to have been replaced (no small task), along with the upstairs joists and timber flooring which are both way too unspoiled to be original; and the walls daubed with a fresh coat of whitewash that makes the space a lot less dingy than it would otherwise be.

And that’s another isolated Dales abandonment documented and ticked off — not exactly an earth-shatteringly informative report I know, but some places just seem to fall off the radar of history — or at least the parts of it easily searchable on the World Wide Web, and who knows? Often publishing these draws out further information from the woodwork, in which case, it’ll all get added here in time.