A WALKING trail through one the most awe-inspiring industrial heritage sites in the Yorkshire Dales has been renewed.

Thirty years ago a total of 18 beautifully illustrated interpretation boards were stationed around Yarnbury, a vast former lead mining area near Grassington in the national park.

With the boards having rotted in the exposed moorland setting, replacements were made and installed earlier this spring. The trail starts by Moor Lane and weaves through the 400-year old workings to the ‘Cupola’ smelt mill chimney standing proud of Grassington Moor, a landmark saved by the Earby Mines Research Group in the early 1970s.

The trail restoration project was part-funded by the national park's Our Common Cause project and by Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust. A short video made at Yarnbury can be seen on YouTube.

Phil Richards, the national park's area ranger for Wharfedale, said he’d been coming to Yarnbury all his life.

“I was born in the village, down in Hebden, so as kids we would come up and explore the area. The trail is well used and it’s nice that we’ve managed to replace the boards and carry out various practical works, because it is quite popular. “But you can get a sense of solitude here, too. It’s a wild spot, very exposed. There’s gritstone overlying limestone and that’s where the veins of galena were found.”

He said that among the most astonishing features of the Yarnbury and Grassington Moor lead mining trail were the dams and leats - waterways constructed to collect water off the moor.

“One of the important things with any mining industry but especially lead was water, so there are various dams around, to power the water wheels to pump out the water from the deep shafts," he said.

" Leats carried water off the moor to these dams; it’s an amazing piece of engineering. The fall on them is so slight, bringing the water downhill, it’s fascinating.”

The very first edition of the Craven Herald in January 1853 contained news on its front page, including the grim report that a man called Thomas Rodgers, from Grassington, was killed when a stone fell on him as he was working on the Beaver Lead Mine on Grassington Moor. The Herald pointed out that his great grandfather, grandfather and cousin were all killed mining on the same moor.

The article illustrates just how different life was in Grassington 150 years ago. Today, thousands of tourists flock to the village: in Victorian times it was a place of hard work, danger and, when cheap imports began to undercut the value of lead brought down from the moor, of poverty.

In 1597 the manor of Grassington was inherited by the Skipton lord George Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland. While lead was worked before the earl's arrival, he gave the industry a fresh impetus. He already owned lead mines in Derbyshire and he (or perhaps some astute steward of his lands) brought in their experience as well as that of miners from Cornwall and Swaledale. One of their first moves was to build a smelt mill alongside the existing corn mill on the river.

The influx of lead mining families changed Grassington forever. The farmsteads were often divided into smaller units for mining families; the folds which today add much to the character of the village are the remains of the old farmyards.

Another example of Grassington's growing importance was the replacement of the wooden bridge over the Wharfe by a stone structure in 1603.

At first it was hump backed, similar to the bridge at Barden, and was widened in 1780 before, in 1825, it was levelled out.

In 1750 the Duke of Devonshire inherited the Grassington lead mines.

He already made large profits from the Derbyshire lead mines and production in Grassington stepped up another gear. A special system to take water pumped up from the mine workings was established and a large smelt mill constructed on the moor, the remnants of which remain today.

He also improved the road to Gargrave where the lead was loaded on to barges on the newly-constructed Leeds and Liverpool canal.

The first half of the 19th century was the heyday of the lead industry in Grassington. From 1870 cheap imports caused a steady decline in population and wealth, even though short lived textile mills provided some employment.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Grassington was on its uppers. Its population had halved and many buildings were falling into disrepair. Happily a new industry was beginning to emerge - tourism.

Guidebooks extolled the delights of the Dales and when local shareholders financed the construction of a railway linking it with Skipton and the cities of the West Riding, Grassington was on the rise.

The railway never quite lived up to expectations and it was cars and coaches which brought most of the visitors to the town. The rail line closed to passenger traffic in 1930 and in 1969 the tracks were ripped up.

The trail is partly on a bridleway and partly on open access land and can be visited at any time.