In Joseph Ford’s book, ‘Some Reminiscences and Folk Lore of Danby Parish and District’, there is a chapter entitled ‘Hart Leap’. Joseph Ford (1870 – 1944) was a stone mason who lived and worked on the Yorkshire Moors, he was also an amateur historian who wrote about his local area. His chapter ‘Hart Leap’ concerns a traditional story about two stone posts set in the moorland up on the ridge between Great Fryup Dale and Glaisdale, a story that Ford believes that circumstantial evidence suggests is true.
The stones are 40 ft. 6ins apart, and on one of the stones is carved the words ‘Hart Leap.’ I have seen the stones myself, they are not too hard to find if you follow Ford’s instructions, although they are certainly set in a remote and desolate place. Standing there and looking about you see the landscape falling and rising splendidly over broad arching ridges and down into fair set dales as far as the eye can see, with only heather to colour the moor tops and fields to colour the sparsely populated dales.
The story goes that the stones commemorate a great leap by a stag hard pressed by huntsmen and hounds. As Joseph Ford writes,
“…for it was there the poor, hunted stag amazed its pursuers by its terrible leap for life and freedom.’
The exact measure of the leap is known because when the huntsmen who saw it came to examine that place they found the footsteps of the stag had ceased and then recommenced, the stones mark the very place where the Hart leapt. Joseph Ford explains,
“It left behind its footprints on the soft surface of the ground at this particular place, showing what a tremendous leap it had made.’
This story has many different points of interest beyond that of local history, to name a few that come to mind, people hunting up on the moors has an interest as social history, the setting up of stones as monuments is a practice almost as old as humanity so has an interest as anthropology, and there is a zoological interest in the behaviour of the stag.
Joseph Ford himself asks, “The stone posts silently speak the words Hart Leap but what do the words mean?” Given that Joseph Ford is not the kind of academic historian who feels the need to be constrained by the conceit of objectivity he provides us with an answer, he explains that this is a received story, one that has “come down the generations, as it was told me when a boy by the oldest inhabitant of Fryup,” and that the hart’s leap was for “life and liberty.”
Two things then, some stories enable a sense of place and identity, and stories can encapsulate grand meanings, the sort of meanings that shape our lives. As a mason Joseph Ford’s work was mainly concerned with the building and repair of domestic structures such as houses, barns and walls, but he also worked on monuments, such as those commemorating the losses of World War One, he knew about marking a sense of identity and meaning in both stone and story. For him, and he expects for us, the leap of the Hart symbolises something of our own struggle for life and liberty. Such grand meanings require the greater perspective of the passing of generations, or the high point on a moor, to be seen.
Now, the rational sceptic in me objects that the stag could have no such idea of “life and liberty” in its head, for that you need a language and culture that is not possessed by deer, but when I read the story the romantic in me feels the elemental power of the desire for life and liberty, so much so that my heart quickens. I suspect Joseph Ford knew what he was doing when he entitled the chapter ‘Hart Leap’ for the heart does indeed leap in sympathy with the animal.
He also knows what he is doing in leaving to the end of his account the question of whether the Hart lived, he writes, “…we could wish it might have gained that freedom for which it so courageously strained.” However, he adds “tradition does not inform us of the result of the chase.”
I very much doubt that having run to earth and captured that desperate and wild animal, having given such a spirited account of its desire to live, I could have brought myself to kill it. But Ford relates the stones were set up centuries ago in very different times, perhaps if feeding my family or obeying my feudal Lord depended on it I would take the stag’s life.
I suppose one may wonder if the story is true, or is it perhaps the result of deliberate deception, or of generations of fanciful story telling? The long, dark winter nights up on those lonesome moors do, I am sure, engender a lively imagination. There is, as Joseph Ford reports, circumstantial evidence to support the story, he also could judge how reliable the old Dalesman who told him the story actually was, an advantage we do not have. The fact that Ford resists manufacturing a happy ending by writing that the stag got away, and alternately did not write gloomily of its gruesome death, but rather stuck with the inconclusive ending suggests to me an honesty about his account, and his integrity as a historian. It could, of course, be a double bluff. All of which is to miss the point, the story is true enough. You can measure how far a Hart leaps but you cannot measure how far the heart leaps.
Pictures included of the Hart Leap stone, the distance marked by the two stones and the moors about. 📷
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