An 18th-century cottage in a picture-perfect village in the Yorkshire Dales

Yorkshire’s striking topography has long held allure for artists and, continuing this lineage, is Kitty North. Her solo show, currently at Salts Mill in West Yorkshire (which has a permanent collection of David Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings) is a reflection of the 30 years she has lived in the Dales.

The last 13 have been in Arncliffe, a remote, picture-perfect village on the River Skirfare, surrounded by fields with dry-stone walls that radiate up out of the valley, as if stretching towards the nearby mighty peaks of Pen-y-ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside. It is there, in a cottage adjacent to her house, studio and Prospect Gallery, which she owns and runs, that she and her friend, fellow artist Robin Lucas, have found a new means of capturing the beauty of the surrounding countryside.

Kitty bought the three-bedroom cottage, which dates to the early 18th century and is typical of the local vernacular, in 2020. ‘It was damp and dilapidated, but I needed a larger studio and wanted to incorporate its garden into my own,’ she explains. In the summer of 2021, with the country reopening after Covid and the restarting of house parties and weekends away, Kitty realised the cottage could have another function. There were, however, budgetary restrictions: ‘We’re a long way from anywhere here, so you don’t throw something away because you don’t like it. Instead, you find a way to make it work.’ Baths and basins were replaced, but the layout was retained – ‘one bedroom and a bathroom are downstairs, but this suits some people’ – along with the kitchen and woodchip wallpaper. ‘Removing it would have been a pain, so we just painted over it,’ she explains.

Then, with a blank slate and Robin staying, the idea arose of using the cottage as a canvas ‘to bring the Dales inside’. ‘There was no plan – it was quite experimental’, he says. ‘One of us would start somewhere, the other would add more – it just evolved.’ Between swims in the river, they used acrylic paints to decorate the walls with grouse moors and boxing hares, imaginatively remapping views so that village houses around the dining room table segue into the Ribblehead Viaduct over the chimneypiece.