Village of the Week: Yorkshire hamlet of Austwick where big boulders are anything but erratic and locals sell jam on their driveways

The Norber erratics are said to be one of the finest groups of glacial erratic boulders in Britain - and they are what would appear to be teetering on the second highest mountain in The Yorkshire Dales - and look down upon the village.

However, they are firmly in place on the southern slopes of Ingleborough and have been for around 18,000 years.

There are more than 100 of them of various shapes and sizes and the boulders, consisting of a variety of sandstone, are perched on ‘plinths’ beneath that are much smaller.

How did they get there is a question that will have left many spectators baffled as hundreds of visitors each year look on in wonderment.

The boulders were probably deposited by melting ice sheets at the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago - however, various accounts would date the rock as from the Silurian Period, which saw the evolution and diversification of fish, some 430 million years ago.

The smaller pieces upon which they sit have ended up as they are seen today because the boulders protected them from water erosion.

They are now a well-known backdrop to images of Austwick which is very much as a visitor to these parts would expect a Yorkshire Dales village to be.

With few winding roads and charming grey stone cottages which date back to the 17th and 18th century, it has that ‘chocolate box appearance’.

On some days you will find tables set up at the end of driveways selling home-made jams and chutneys with an honesty box for payment - it is ‘that’ kind of Yorkshire village.

The local parish council estimates that people have lived here for 4,000 years and that the name 'Austwick' is of Norse/Viking derivation, meaning 'a settlement to the east', presumably to the east of Clapham, a neighbouring village.

Whilst tourism and second home ownership does to some extent define the village (there are no houses for sale and in the nearby village of Giggleswick, the one that is costs £1.5m), it is very much still steeped in its rural and farming origins.

The dry-stone walls which roughly line the fields will have been started in the early 1800s and and steep moorland will always surround the village and be home to thousands of sheep which, it is said, are still driven through the village when need be.

Village life has the essentials - a pub and a shop.

Cross Leigh Stores is one of those rare finds these days. Small and independent but where you could get pretty much all you need under one roof - and it knows where it has come from.

Eggs from farmers in Craven, yogurts from Longley Farm, pies come from a butcher in Kirby Lonsdale and meat from the family butcher in a hamlet near Skipton and so on.

The Game Cock pub is the perfect pub for a light ale refreshment after a trek up to see those boulders and has been family run for years. That said, the current bosses have announced they are leaving at the end of August so hopefully someone new will take on this venture that is popular with visitors but an essential part of village life.

Also part of this village’s life is the Austwick Cuckoo Festival. Sometimes, Austwick is known as 'Cuckoo Town'.

The story goes that, in days gone by, as the cuckoo was generally a bringer of good weather in spring and early summer, the villagers attempted to keep the cuckoo all year by building a wall around the tree in which a particular cuckoo roosted.

However, at first light, the cuckoo simply flew away over the top of the wall.

Each year, in May, the village holds a Cuckoo Festival and Street Market when the village is decorated with hand made cuckoos while a day long open air market is held.

This year, the Austwick Amble Fell Race will once again be held in conjunction with the festival and market on Monday May 29 where runners in the senior race take on a loop circuit of eight miles and an ascent of 1200 feet.

However, no account of Austwick would be complete without reference to the title of Lord of the Manor, which Austwick still has.

The most recent holder was Dr John Farrar who was born in Sydney in Australia in 1921 before his family moved to Melbourne.

He trained as a doctor and had his own family but one day got a telegram to say his uncle, Roland, had died and the estate back here in Austwick had fallen to him.

The death was perhaps unexpected at the time but what it would mean for Dr Farrar was not so much.

The manor of Austwick had been in the family since the 1700s and so in 1953 he arrived in Austwick with his own family and set about managing the estate’s farms, rental cottages, woodland, grouse moor and while trying to balance the books.

Much of this work he did himself, whilst working part-time in medical care as a locum for example, but also more often being spotted wielding chainsaws, on rooves and repairing stone walls.

If not busy enough, Dr Farrar undertook to keep a record of rainfall in the area and it became a record that was unbroken for 60 years.

He maintained the church clock at St James’ Church, Clapham each week for the 30 years before his death in 2014 at the age of 92.

It was only a few weeks past the 60th anniversary of his arrival in Yorkshire.

The church clock was reported by residents to have stopped at 8.15am that day, the exact time that his death was recorded.