a litle alehouse:
David and Angela Boulton suggest that this may have been the drovers' inn at Cam Houses, now on the Dales Way.¹ This identification however depends on Fox having taken a particular route from Scar House as part of a particular sequence of events: Fox's own account is not as clear as this. In both Long and Short Journal he says that it happened the night after he had escaped from the great house (equally unidentifiable): before that he had been going up Wensleydale for an unspecified length of time; after escaping, he ‘came through other dales’ until he came to the (equally unidentifiable) house of the kinsman of John Blaykling’s. The alehouse's potentially murderous clientèle may have been drovers, as the Boultons suggest, or just ill-regulated local inhabitants.

1.    David and Anthea Boulton In Fox's Footsteps (Dent: Dales Historical Monographs, 1998) pages 61–94.     Return