IT IS always pleasing to be of assistance. So today we can report that it was a job advert in the Craven Herald which led, if somewhat indirectly, to a slender young brunette helping to save a traditional Dales craft by taking up a career as ... a blacksmith.

Thanks to that ad, sparks are still flying and the anvil is still ringing in the old forge in the jumble of back streets that lead up the hillside behind Settle's famous market place.

Much to the surprise of many visitors, one of the people swinging the blacksmith's heavy hammer is 28-year-old Rachel Clements, mother, craftswoman and university graduate who once planned a trendy career in the media.

Here is a family where both man and wife wear the traditional leather blacksmith's apron, for husband David is a blacksmith too. How they got there is an intriguing tale.

David, now 34, had graduated from art college in three-dimensional design (whatever that is) and had taken a job in London with a national retail chain. His job was to design shop interiors. And he hated it.

Rachel had just graduated from Newcastle University in media production (I'm not quite sure what that is either) and like many young students before and since, she had run up a big overdraft. To pay it off whilst looking for a job, she was working behind the bar in the pub at Kilnsey, where her mother lived.

David,whenever he could, got out of London and the rat-race to spend long weekends with his parents, who had settled in Kettlewell. As is the way of these things, the two met and began to plan a future together. Both decided they wanted to make a living in the Dales. But how?

That's where the Craven Herald advert came in. David spotted it and applied for a job as an estate worker on the National Trust estate at Malham. There, as a lad who had spent much of his childhood helping his father restore old cars, David was a pretty good hand with a welding torch. At Malham, he found there was a need for a blacksmith for jobs like repairing iron gates and ornate railings.

Over the tops at Austwick there was an old forge, long since converted into a motor repair workshop and the blacksmith's equipment was on the market. A friend took over the garage and offered David the smithy. A new career began.

"The people in Austwick were so keen to get the smithy going again that they brought me in plenty of little jobs like repairing garden tools," he recalls now. "That is the sort of thing a blacksmith used do do in Dales villages. Soon, I was so busy that I could not longer cope so I looked round for help. And guess who volunteered?"

It was, of course, Rachel, who began to help out at weekends as a "spare pair of hands." It didn't take her long to realise that, contrary to centuries old belief, smithying is about brain, not brawn, more skill than sweat.

"I can do this," she thought and went off to college in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on the only blacksmith's course in the country. She was only the fourth woman to take the course in the previous 20 years.

Now, on paper at least, Rachel is better qualified than David.

Five years ago, when Settle's only blacksmith, Alf Limmer, was retiring after some 50 years in the trade, a local benefactor bought the forge and the house next door to keep this ancient craft alive. The lease was offered to David and Rachel and they leapt at the chance.

Says David: "We still do the little repair jobs that blacksmiths have done in small communities for years. But we are gradually expanding into more art-based work which will last for 150 years or more."

The couple recently designed and made a set of handsome memorial gates at Coniston Cold parish church, an elaborate design which includes several brass wrens - "That will leave our little mark on the Dales for many generations," said Rachel, who last year won the top prize for smithying at the Great Yorkshire Show.

A word of warning for equestrians though: the couple do not shoe horses because, as David explains, the work of a farrier is a completely different skill which would mean another long college course. Now that they have their first child, Oscar, one next month, they don't have the time.

But the good news is that they are already looking for a young apprentice to take over the day-to-day work whilst they concentrate on more of their grander designs. What's more, David's dad, having helped out at the Settle forge, has now become the blacksmith at Malham.

So the sparks still fly at Settle and Malham, an ancient skill is being kept alive and it's offering new employment too. One can't ask for more.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.