When the weather was unusually severe, the villages would be completely cut off. Alice Morris remembered as a child: One very exciting time was the deep snow of 1881.

We had no bread for days, as even the men couldn’t get on the roads to get any. As we had plenty of flour and lard we did very well. The only drawback was we had nowhere to bake, only a brick oven which we couldn’t heat. So we had to cook or bake in a gypsy cauldron. We made a kind of thick pancake which we called ‘pot cakes’. W.I. Scrapbook, 1958.