Swaledale Museum

Swaledale Museum occupies the former Methodist school room built in 1836 beside the green at Reeth, bought from the Methodist Church in 1974 and opened that year as the Swaledale Folk Museum. Run entirely by volunteers, the single-site museum holds a growing collection of objects gathered from Swaledale and neighbouring Arkengarthdale, with displays covering the lead mining industry that once dominated the dale, alongside hand knitting, farming, and domestic life. Reconstructed room settings and archive photographs trace how families in the district lived and worked before the industry's decline in the nineteenth century. Independent of any wider museum group beyond its own volunteer committee, it remains one of the smaller specialist museums in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.