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built by Uther Pendragon, who died after drinking the deliberately poisoned waters of a nearby spring. Sir Hugh Morville, one of the murderers of Thomas à Becket, also lived here, adding to the area’s dark history.
    There is a happier story at the next station, Garsdale, which once had water troughs for the express train steam engines to refill their tenders on the move after wheezing up the gradients. The troughs were the highest in England and were steam heated to stop them freezing over. Garsdale is most famous these days for its little statue of Ruswarp, the collie dog who attained fame by putting its paw print on the petition that helped to save the line in the 1980s. Ruswarp (pronounced Russup) belonged to Graham Nuttall from Burnley, the first secretary of the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle. In 1990 Nuttall went missing while walking in mid-Wales. When his body was found eleven weeks later, the dog was still by his master’s side and lived just long enough to attend his funeral. Now Ruswarp is up there in the Settle and Carlisle Hall of Fame.
    At Dent I am the only passenger to alight. I’m here in the darkness by chance because of a man I met on a train. It was on a journey to Edinburgh six months previously that I had struck up a conversation with Robin Hughes, a surveyor from Guildford, who had bought the old station buildings there and was busy restoring them. ‘It used to be the second-highest in Britain until Princetown station on Dartmoor closed in 1956. Now it’s in the record books. Come and try it out,’ he said. ‘I’ve just done up one of the snow huts. I’d be interested to know what you think.’
    But as sharp Pennine gusts and horizontal rain streak across Widdale Fell, I start to wonder if I’ve been rash. As the lights of the last train south to Leeds vanish into the night, I wonder if I have arrived in a place that might make Cold Comfort Farm seem welcoming. A tattered notice by the platform gate proclaims, ‘Dent station is very isolated. The village of Dent is more than four and a half miles away. Very occasionally, people find themselves stranded here. The house near the road is occupied by Roy and Jenny Holmes, who will help you.’ The snow huts at the end of the old goods yard look dark and shuttered, and there doesn’t look like any sign of life in the Holmeses’ house. Will the key be under the mat as promised? (Robin Hughes is unavoidably in Surrey, he has told me.) I begin to contemplate a very cold night on the stone flags of the spartan platform shelter.
    But, hurrah, the key is there, and after a couple of rusty-sounding twists it works. The snow huts, built in 1885, were once primitive billets for gangs stationed there through the winter for the back-breaking job of shovelling away the snow when it drifted onto the track. On the embankment above, silhouetted like stumps of rotten teeth, are lines of old railway sleepers, placed there to hold back drifting snow in the days before global warming, when Britain had proper winters. Fortunately, the only shovelling I have to do is to get the coal into the modern stove and light the newspaper and sticks. I wonder how the old gangers might have reacted if they had known that their damp little billet would one day be equipped with HD television, with halogen cooking and a wet room with underfloor heating. The only thing I have in common with the past is the fact that Dent is famous for having no mobile phone signal, and thus I am out of communication with the world.
    Not entirely out of contact, however, since the legendary Mr and Mrs Holmes appear and offer me a lift into Dent village – ‘Just wondering if you’d had anything to eat, love.’ Roy, now retired, was the local electrician and bought the handsome gabled stationmaster ’s house back in the 1970s. It sits high on the brow of a hill (because Settle and Carlisle stationmasters of olden times were too