34 WESTMORLAND AGRICULTURE, 1800-1900 



of Kendal, and hoops and slates which they carried to Liverpool and 

 Glasgow to return with grain and coal, the increasing trade of the 

 county was carried on. To this extent were the pack-horse tracks 

 done away with in the county, and pack horses and panniers displaced 

 by coaches and carts, which gradually became the general means 

 of conveying passengers, produce, and merchandise from one town 

 to another, though for many years the old tracks and the pack horses 

 with their hults and panniers were to remain the only means of com- 

 munication for the farmers between one valley and another or one 

 village and another over the rough uncultivated moors and commons 

 which these direct turnpikes did not touch. 



"There are many of the old inhabitants," wrote Craig Gibson in 

 1868, " in Langdale who remember the gangs of pack horses on their way 

 from Kendal to Whitehaven over Hardnot and Wrynose, one especially, 

 led by a sagacious old black stallion ; their master and only attendant 

 rode a pony, and had a habit of taking his ease at his several inns 

 along the route, following and overtaking the horses between his 

 stopping places and riding on to the next, where he would rest and 

 drink until they had plodded patiently past, when, at his own good 

 time, he would follow and repeat the process." This was the last route 

 regularly travelled by pack-horse gangs in Westmorland. 



The inclosure of the commons and the setting out of roads, which 

 the various Inclosure Acts provided for, being made under the awards, 

 was the gradual and final displacement of the pack-horse tracks and 

 their accompanying means of communication. In 1757 the first 

 carriers' stage waggon was put upon the road between Kendal and 

 London, carrying the hams, butter, and fruit of the farmers, the only 

 produce they had to dispose of, to the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, 

 and to the Metropolis. For nearly a century this was to remain the means 

 of communication between the county and the larger towns which 

 offered increased prices for what little produce there was to sell. 



Gradually, as the commons were inclosed, the other roads were 

 improved, and single-horsed carts were introduced in the remoter 

 districts — these were a special cart peculiar to Cumberland and 

 Westmorland, and are supposed to have originated in these counties 

 through the small acreage of the farms, only a single horse being 

 required — at first they were merely a few boards on solid wheels without 



