The following contemporary account relating to the construction of the Settle - Carlisle railway appeared on page 3 (column 3) of the September 3rd, 1870 edition of the Lancaster Guardian.
The Death of Mrs. Powell
It will be remembered by the readers of the Lancaster Guardian that a few weeks ago an engine ran off the tramway, on its way to the south entrance of the tunnel when Annie Walk, the niece of Mrs. Powell, was scalded and covered with earth pitched from a wagon next to the engine and killed, and that Mrs. Powell was severely scalded from her feet to her waist. After lingering for a month in great suffering which she bore with much patience, and being visited by many medical gentlemen, she succumbed on Thursday, the 25th ult., and ended her earthly career in the 28th year of her age. Her funeral took place on Sunday afternoon, when she was interred in the little but beautiful graveyard at Chapel-le-Dale. The corpse, which was covered with a black pall with a deep fringe of white, was carried from Sebastapol over the moor in a light cart to the road at Batty Wife Hole, when it was taken out and borne past the numerous huts on the shoulders of men who wore black shoulder scarfs. The funeral was numerously attended, and all the bearers of the corpse and followers were neatly, and respectably dressed. It had a singular appearance to see the procession wending its way to the highroad over a desolate moor, where a month or two ago not a human hut was to be seen, and to notice that a funeral in one of our most orderly towns could not here have surpassed it for good and solemn behaviour, and for the neatness and respectability of the attendants. In the evening Mr. Tiplady, the railway missionary, improved her death in a sermon in the hut in which she died. The service here would have taken place in the open air if the weather had not been unfavourable. The hut was crowded and many could not gain admission.
Acknowledgements
The text quoted above was manually transcribed from a 35mm microfilm copy of the newspaper by Mark R. Harvey during a visit to Lancaster Library on July 10th, 2007.