“YOUR picture shows a house currently known as Greenlands, situated a hundred yards or so north of Angram village centre – I checked this morning while driving the Little White Bus to Keld,” emailed William Manning of Reeth in response to last week’s mystery.

All we knew about the black-and-white photo was the one word the photographer had written on the back: “Swaledale.”

To locate it precisely, the Little White Bus would have been travelling on the B6270, the road which runs along the bottom of the dale going west out of Reeth.

The bus had passed through Muker, gone over Duckingdub Bridge into Thwaite (which means “a meadow”) from where the b-road gains a wonderful local name, Cloggerby Rigg, as it turns north. There’s Dirty Piece and Skeb Skeugh on its east before it reaches Angram, which means “grazing land” in Old English.

With the full height of Kisdon on the right, the bus would pass the uninhabited Crag Hall before coming to a hamlet which the Ordnance Survey map calls Greens, but to which upper Swaledale people add an extra syllable.

“Greenses is a place with two farms, Greenses North, which dates from around 1650,” says Professor Ian Purves, who lives out that way. “The Alderson family had daughters who married into the Calvert family and they built Greenses South for them in about 1760.”

It is Greenses South, which is now a bed and breakfast called Greenlands, that is in our picture. Perhaps the reason the photographer wasn’t more precise was because he didn’t think it needed any further locating – loads of other people, including James Pearson of Mickleton and Ernest Whitehead of Keld, knew precisely where it was.

It is obvious when you think about it: the Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names says that the Old English word “grene” commonly describes a green spot – and you’d expect to find a green spot just along from the “grazing place”.

“There’s Thorns Greens nearby, and Greenses Gill and there’s a spring under Kisdon called Greenses Spring,” says Ian, showing that it really is a green place.

Mark and Jude Waterton also identified Greenlands, as they’ve lived there for the last two years. “The front half is about 1830 and the back half is about 1750,” said Mark. “The outbuilding on the picture was referred to as a carthouse, although it could have been a forge because inside there’s the remains of a large fireplace.”

Many of our other informants referred to it as a smithy, and in the days of agriculture and leadmining, there would have lots of passing ponies to keep a blacksmith busy.

Many thanks to everyone who responded – but only one person could name the farmer at Greenses.

“I didn’t know it had been taken, but it would have been the late 1970s,” says Steven Calvert, of Reeth. “I was in my late teens, and I was carrying a can of sheep food and I was taking sheep from our field about quarter of a mile away to the farm at Greenses for lambing time – so it was probably the first week in April.”

Steven, who now lives in Reeth, is at least the third generation of Calverts to have farmed at Greenses, although all branches of his family tree have their roots deep in the dale. “Smash Willy Alderson was my grandmother’s brother,” he says. “He smashed all the records for getting coal out of the Tan Hill mines.”

There wasn’t a story attached to the picture – it was just an image that the passing photographer liked.

“I remember that I was wearing what we call a pom-pom hat – a hat with a pom-pom on top, a nylon boiler suit and wellies,” says Steven, as if it were yesterday, only it is at least 40 years ago.