Stang Head

Stang Head is the Crown's western work, built like all four march blockhouses within the last two centuries and sited at the mouth of the western valley to shut the drove road where it climbs into the fells. Beyond it the high ground is a matter of local guidance. Its defining episode is the Stang Head Sitting, a siege of unrecorded length whose days somebody scored on the gatepost; the marks can still be read. The Sitting is why the work draws water from a well inside its wall rather than from a spring outside it. A muster was called to relieve it and got through, the only clear success in the march's muster book.

Six men hold it under Serjeant Gideon Wharfe, who once told a company at the gate that north of the wall the law reaches as far as the blockhouse roof can see. It is the only work with its own chapel, served quarterly by a chaplain from Harrowgate; between visits the serjeant reads the office from a book left by his predecessor, which the priory has chosen not to notice. Like two of the other works it also keeps an unconsecrated shrine within the wall, paid for by the men, and its bell sounds at dusk and whenever the watch changes.

Drovers use it more than anyone, and its gate book is the only one in the march that counts more sheep than men. Above it, old Isaac Norbury, who holds one of the dale's dying family terms, has turned away the Concord's treaty clerk as roughly as he turns away the Milsoms. The district gives the Sitting as practical advice rather than as history.

For the traveller: this is the last wall to expect before the high ground. Enter your name, patron and road, ask what the tops are doing, and remember that between Martinmas and Candlemas nothing crosses them under escort at any price.