Yordas area question

[Badlad]

Above Yordas there are two dams built across the stream with concrete and rebar. Looks quite old. Down either side of the Yordas enclosure there appear to be old excavations, possibly drainage channels. Can anyone shed any light of what these were for?

 

[Badlad]

A rather poor shot of the 'ditches' on the up valley side.

 

[Badlad]

The dams above Yordas. Anybody?

 

[Pitlamp]

An interesting question.

The picture of the ditches makes them almost look like "holloways" (trackways worn by horse-drawn carts over the years). But that may be a red herring.

 

[alanw]

Lidar
The hollow coming from the south, and the zig-zag to the north look like tracks, but the other ones look as if water had eroded them. There was a quarry just off the NW corner of this image.

 

[Jim MacPherson]

Just to be of little benefit, there is no evidence of dams on the 1851 25 inch OS map and the early surveyors were fairly punctilious about recording things (but it does say the quarry was producing "black marble" so might be a pretty exposure of dark limestone), nothing of the 1907 version and nothing on the current OS mapping.

Jim

 

[Badlad]

That's a great image alanw, shows them perfectly. The 'ditches', 'trackways', whatever they are do not look natural one bit.

What with the dams above they sort of look like an attempt to divert water away from the cave. Could it have been something those Victorians got up to?

 

[Badlad]

Jim's map does show a track on the northern side which corresponds to the ditches there.

 

[shotlighter]

That's a great image alanw, shows them perfectly. The 'ditches', 'trackways', whatever they are do not look natural one bit.

What with the dams above they sort of look like an attempt to divert water away from the cave. Could it have been something those Victorians got up to?

I was wondering if it was something to do with when it was a showcave?

 

[langcliffe]

I was wondering if it was something to do with when it was a showcave?

Unlikely. Yordas show cave was a very low-key enterprise, with only the occasional visitor (although it did have some very eminent ones including Wordsworth and Turner).

In 1890 Balderstone records knocking on the door of Braida Garth, crossing the chap's palm with a florin, and being taken in through the locked entrance door with some candles.

 

[ChrisB]

Could it have been something those Victorians got up to?

Are the metal rods sticking up from the dam identifiably rebar (spiral or chevron patterns on the surface) or plain? Reinforced concrete was developed during Victorian times but what we now think of as rebar didn't appear until the 1930s. I can't think what the purpose of those rods would be.

 

[Badlad]

The steel is smooth, about inch or inch and a quarter diameter. You can see them sticking up with weed around them in the picture. I may have mis described them as rebar. They may be drilled into the bedrock.

 

[Jim MacPherson]

Just because I've done some of the garden's grass cutting and somewhat hot and bothered (sun and no rain), a bit about the quarry and it's black marble, nothing about the geology, maybe akin to Frosterley Marble, perhaps a passing geologist might know?

Old Cumbria Gazetteer - quarry, North Yorkshire

Doesn't explain the dams or the reinforcing metal bits, as speculating's always fun from the photo they do seem be of a nearly uniform height above and angle to the concrete dam wall face.

Jim