Dancing across the Yorkshire Dales

In many parts of England local dances have long died out. Not so in Yorkshire. Dancing continued on a regular basis in the Dales communities right up to the 2000s. Those occasions were social gatherings, and dancing was an important vehicle for drawing people together in scattered, remote communities. The village dances were very popular, with combinations of what we would now call ‘folk’ and ‘Old Time’ dances. At the time they would be seen merely as ‘our local dances’.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, collectors (Leta Douglas, Peter Kennedy, Tom and Joan Flett, John Browell) came to the Dales and interviewed musicians who could remember their tunes and associated dances. In 2020 local musician and researcher, Bob Ellis, published ‘There was None of this Lazy Dancing!’ and set out the collected tunes, dances, and accounts from those musicians.

I’m a caller, dancer, and dance musician. In reading Bob’s book, I became aware of the similarities and differences between some of the versions of these dances, and also the gaps in some of the accounts of the dances that were regularly danced. Indeed, in some accounts, only a list of the dances performed regularly – or danced on a specific date – is given, but without details of how those dances worked. I became interested in what the programme of an evening’s dancing in the Dales might have contained. My research has taken me to other sources of folk and Old-time dances in the north of England and across into Scotland.

It's said that every other dance in an evening’s dancing in the Dales was a waltz! However, a lot of couple dances other than waltzes were enjoyed: The Barn Dance, Polka, Boston Two Step etc., and it is satisfying to draw up a dance list in which set dances alternate with couple dances, waltzes included.

I’m working with the Dales Traditional Music and Dance Collective, and this spring, musician Mark Wallace and I began working on a five-year project to return these dances and tunes into communities across the Dales. As well as running public workshops, we’re taking the dances and tunes into local schools to introduce the children – and later their parents – to their local dances, and to deepen their appreciation of their heritage. In April dancing returned to the Buckden Institute to celebrate the local Beresford family who have seven generations of musicians! It was a privilege to lead the dancing for them, and learn about recent experiences of dancing there.

These dances and tunes are part of Yorkshire’s heritage, and we’re proud to be working to keep them alive. There was none of this lazy dancing then – and there doesn’t need to be any now!

Peter Barnard ~ June 2025