Theakston Brewery company acquired and closed down the Lightfoot Brewery, also in Masham. Theakston's expanded into Cumbria in 1974 buying the Carlisle State Management Brewery. The brewery had been owned and operated by the government since 1916. However, the site was a financial drain on Theakston's and led to the company being taken over in 1984 by Blackburn based brewer, Matthew Brown plc. Matthew Brown was itself taken over by Scottish & Newcastle in 1987. Paul Theakston (Managing Director since 1968) left Theakston's in 1988, and in 1992 established the Black Sheep Brewery in the old Lightfoot Brewery premises - located adjacent
Black Sheep (Hill novel) reveals the book was inspired by "a black and white photograph of a 19th-century engraving she found online". The village was, she says, "exactly as I describe. It was essentially an amphitheatre with all the mine workings in the bottom with the great gantry thing, and terraces of houses going up, and a little path with a gate through which people went down to work, and you could just see at the top where the houses petered out, farmland, country. You couldn't think of a more closed community than this bowl." Black Sheep (Hill novel) Black Sheep, is a novella