Geograph - photograph every grid square

Scarp slope and a suspicious line

The northern scarp of the Tabular Hills at Boon Hill. Near the bottom of the slope can be seen a horizontal line [the section nearest the camera being a fence line], which marks the course of the old Starfits water race, originally constructed circa 1760 and long since abandoned. The Starfits race was surveyed and engineered by Joseph Foord, a local farmer of Skiplam Grange. He was employed by the Duncombe estate to bring water from reliable sources on the moors to the farms and villages on the limestone Tabular Hills, where water supplies were scarce. This particular race ran a total of 8.8 miles from Ouse Gill to Fadmoor and on as far as Howkeld Mill [in SE6885]. Like Foord's other races, this one had to 'climb' on to the Tabular Hills from a low point on the moors, this being done by clever contouring of the scarp slope at a very gentle gradient - in this case at about 1/317. A few metres to the left of where I was standing there is a distinct hump in the narrow lane, where the race once crossed and on the south side is a raised bank, now mostly covered in vegetation and used as a manure heap [thus no photo] where twin races ran side by side, one veering around the west side of Boon Hill and the other around the east side.