BBC“I actually feel that living at Tan Hill Inn set me in the right frame of mind for later challenges that came – you know, if this doesn’t beat you, you’re going to get through.”
Ninety-year-old Audrey Yeardley stops to look around the low-beamed room; the fire is roaring and a steady stream of customers order at the bar of Britain’s highest pub.
Outside, rolling hills and vast moorland stretch out as far as the eye can see.
Set 1,732ft (528m) above sea level, Tan Hill Inn is an isolated Yorkshire Dales pub, situated six miles from a main road and often cut off in bad weather.
But for Ms Yeardley and other former landladies and family members who have returned to meet their predecessors for the first time, it represents much more.
That isn’t to say they don’t all have their fair share of snowed-in stories.
In 1963, Ms Yeardley, her husband and two young sons were trapped in the pub by snow drifts reaching 20ft high, for 13 weeks without electricity or running water.
She describes boiling snow in saucepans and living off potatoes until local farmers could make the treacherous journey across the moorland to deliver supplies.
“It’s not been beaten yet,” she says, still smiling, about the length of the isolation.
“You just have to do your best to survive it. You have a challenge, it might have you on your knees sometimes but I owe a lot down to character-building.”
Ms Yeardley and her family lived at Tan Hill Inn until 1967, when Sue and Neil Hanson took over tenure until 1985.
The two women have spoken on the phone but never met until today, but they trade stories over the pub’s wooden tables like they’ve been friends for years.
Ms Hanson, 76, describes her experience as “the best of times and the worst of times” but said she wouldn’t trade it “for the world, there’s not a single regret”.
“It’s a different time now and it’s lovely that the pub is breathing again, it’s renewed – it’s three times the size that it was when I was here,” she explains.
“I’ve always been fond of the country but this is extreme country, desolate and I couldn’t believe there was a place up here.
“The moorland here is different and the people here are different too – they’re the best people.”
She fondly recalls the sense of community and a feeling that locals would look out for one another, helping whenever was needed.
At this, Ms Yeardley nods emphatically.
“This landscape has an orchestra and the locals know it – if you talk to them and they trust you, they’ll say they have the music as well so that’s what makes it special,” she adds.
In another corner of the busy pub, Kim Longden and her schoolfriend have also made the trip up the winding single-track road.
For Ms Longden it’s also a trip down memory lane; she lived at Tan Hill Inn until the age of 22 after her parents Alec and Margaret Baines bought the pub in 1985.
“I wouldn’t say the childhood I had was a normal childhood but it was definitely a fulfilled childhood,” she says.
“Everything happened here; my 18th [birthday], my 21st, various family weddings, karaoke nights – we had good parties.”
Ms Longden lives nearby and says she still revisits her old home when she can.
“I’m eight miles away across the moors, and I can see Tan Hill from my bedroom window,” she says.
“It’s a very homely place for me. I can sit here and envisage what we were doing back in the day, I can walk myself upstairs in my mind and go to my bedroom.”
Tan Hill Inn is now run and owned by Andrew Hields, who says the reunion of former landladies and family members is a way to preserve the pub’s legacy.
“All the chapters are interesting, and we just feel a responsibility to capture it all now,” he explains.
Nicola TownsendNot all the women gathered today settled as close to the pub as Ms Longden; Ms Hanson lives in Cumbria and Ms Yeardley travelled down from Fife, Scotland.
She says she had “a sudden urge” to return, and called it “magical” to meet others who shared the unique experience of calling Tan Hill Inn home for a time.
“Every mile I got younger in my head, so when I got here I was in my late twenties,” she says.
“Every time I come back it’s like it was – there’s a homesickness for it.”
