Elderly travelling salesmen would trek onto these moors, even in the height of winter, to sell trinkets from bags and baskets. These were mendicants and old soldiers, and they often met their deaths on these inhospitable moorlands. There are stories of how sheepdogs, during the spring and summer after a particularly hard winter, would find the decaying bodies or bones of these men. Bodies were found lying near the streams or other isolated places where they had fallen, unable to reach the warmth and security of the Lettered Board or any other shelter. The weather had killed them.
Walker/Murders
Sometimes fortune-telling gypsy women, those accompanying the hawker gangs, and “the ladies of the road,” take their ale there, but for some reason, it is considered bad form for a village dame or maiden to be seen “going to t’public.”
Fairfax-Blakeborough/Yorkshire
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 
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