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Garsdale in winter with snow-covered fields and dry stone walls

Garsdale Dialect

Traditional words and phrases from the dale

Garsdale has its own traditional dialect, rooted in Old Norse and shaped by centuries of relative isolation. Some of these words have fallen out of everyday use, but many are still heard in conversation around the dale. Visitors may encounter a few of them, and knowing what they mean adds to the pleasure of being here.

A Selection of Garsdale Words

  • addle -- to earn ("he addled a good wage")
  • bairn or barn -- a child
  • brant -- steep
  • cleg -- a horse fly
  • fettle -- working order, condition ("in good fettle")
  • ginnel -- a narrow passage between buildings
  • heeaf -- home; also the learnt area of fell that a sheep returns to graze
  • laik -- to play
Lamb by a dry stone wall in Garsdale
  • mowdy -- a mole
  • neb -- a beak, a nose, or the peak of a cap
  • smoot -- a low door or gap in a wall for sheep to pass through
  • sneck -- a door latch or fastener
  • syke -- a small stream or drain
  • tewit -- a lapwing (from the sound of its call)
  • thrang -- busy, crowded
Swaledale sheep in snowy Garsdale

Heeafed Sheep

One word worth knowing is heeaf, because it explains something fundamental about hill farming in the dales. Fell sheep are "heeafed" to a particular area of open moorland, meaning they learn from their mothers where to graze and they stay there, generation after generation, without fences. When a farm changes hands, the sheep are sold with the land because they carry this knowledge. Losing heeafed sheep means losing centuries of learned behaviour that cannot easily be replaced.