Gant Fell

Gant Fell is a lone hill a little over two thousand feet high at the wold's northern end, and every part of the march can see it: it shuts off the dale head above Harrowgate, and serves the fen villages as a weather glass in clear weather. Grazed and walled below a thousand feet, open fell with two empty shielings above, it ends in bare scree that nobody climbs. The summit appears in no bounding, survey, assize matter or grazing quarrel in four centuries of parish entries, so the avoidance is older than the parish books. It counts among the march's five grounds that no one enters, though no instrument closes it and no law forbids the ascent.

At about eleven hundred feet live the Ganthwaites, four households and under thirty people, named by the dale after the hill. They are in the tithe book from its first page, appear in no assize roll as party or witness, marry within the upland and carry their dead down to Saint Everild's at Harrowgate in any weather. What the march can see of their practice is four things: something carried up to an unmarked place on the shoulder four times a year, some two hundred acres of their finest grazing kept free of stock, a bell rung from the house each dusk, all year round, and nothing asked of anyone else. In the hard winter of 4617, when two dales lost stock badly, they lost none, and their explanation about the lie of the ground satisfied nobody.

The march gives three accounts of them: a pact family with an old and well-kept bargain, which is the priory's written view; a family that is now itself the bargain, as the upper dale whispers; and, rarely and over a fire, something of the fell wearing a family's shape. The evidence fits all three. Six parties have tried the summit in eighty years. Two gave up at the scree, three lower down with a calm conviction that going on was pointless, and of the fourth, three came down that evening and the last two days later on the far side, never to return to the march. Corvin Thorne has a verse about the Gant Fell road that he will not sing north of Harrowgate.

If cloud is on the fell before mid-morning, do not cross the wold that day. The lower and middle slopes are good walking with the best views in the march; shut what you open and keep off the unstocked ground, where a Ganthwaite will come and stand until you leave. If a commission requires the summit, go in June or July, take more rope than seems needed, and post a man at the house with a fixed hour.