The second feature of the season is a piece of twentieth century archaeology - the churn stand. There are churn stands all around the country, in fact they appear in many areas where dairying was commonplace during the first half of the twentieth century. There are an especially high number within the Dales, and in some parts of the National Park there may literally be a churn stand for every farm.
An example of a churn standThe stands, are as you might guess, are roadside platforms built to allow easy loading of milk churns onto trucks, and perhaps initially even onto carts. Until the introduction of stricter regulations in dairying, a churn stand loaded with full or empty churns would have been a common sight along many Dales roads. The milk was collected and taken to some of the larger dairies, at Hawes, Skipton and even Leeds. Eventually new regulations changed the way milk was transported, and the churn stands went out of use overnight, as tankers were introduced to collect the milk directly from storage tanks in the farm dairy.
As far as we know, the stands are simple structures, rectangular or square in plan and normally stone built. They sometimes have a stone slate covering, but more frequently a macadamised or concrete platform for the churns to rest on.
Churn stands are quite vulnerable, firstly, because they frequently have no modern use, but also because they are invariably in a roadside position and the stone that they are built from is consequently easy to remove for other building projects. Despite this they tend to blend in quite well and we think that many of them will survive having largely been unnoticed over the last forty years or so. Some will have been reused for entirely different purposes.
