Shap Rural is a very large, but sparsely populated, civil parish in the Eden District

Eden, Cumbria

Eden is a local government district in Cumbria, England. Its council is based in Penrith. It is named after the River Eden which flows north through the district toward Carlisle....

 of Cumbria

Cumbria

Cumbria , is a non-metropolitan county in North West England. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local authority, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumbria's largest settlement and county town is Carlisle. It consists of six districts, and in...

 in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, covering part of the Lake District National Park

Lake District National Park

The Lake District National Park is located in the north-west of England and is the largest of the English National Parks and the second largest in the United Kingdom. It is in the central and most-visited part of the Lake District....

. It has a population of 119.

Within the parish are the hamlets

Hamlet (place)

A hamlet is usually a rural settlement which is too small to be considered a village, though sometimes the word is used for a different sort of community. Historically, when a hamlet became large enough to justify building a church, it was then classified as a village...

 and settlements of Wet Sleddale, Hardendale

Hardendale

Hardendale is a hamlet in the parish of Shap Rural in the Eden District, in the English county of Cumbria, England, near Shap and junction 39 of the M6 motorway. It is also near the hamlet of Oddendale.-References:...

 and Swindale, most of the Shap Fells range and the reservoirs of Haweswater

Haweswater Reservoir

Haweswater is a reservoir in the English Lake District, built in the valley of Mardale in the county of Cumbria. The controversial construction of the Haweswater dam started in 1929, after Parliament passed an Act giving the Manchester Corporation permission to build the reservoir to supply water...

 (part) and Wet Sleddale

Wet Sleddale Reservoir

Wet Sleddale Reservoir is an artificial reservoir set amongst the Shap Fells south of the village of Shap in Cumbria, England and lies just within the boundary of the Lake District National Park. The triangular shaped reservoir, which can store 2,300 million litres of water, was created by the...

. The village of Mardale Green

Mardale

Mardale is a glacial valley in the Lake District, in northern England. The valley used to have a hamlet at its head, called Mardale Green, but this village was submerged in 1935 when the water level of the valley's lake, Haweswater, was raised to form Haweswater Reservoir by the Manchester...

, which disappeared when Haweswater was converted into a reservoir in the 1930s, was in the parish.

The parish was created in 1906 with the splitting of the former civil parish of Shap into urban and rural parts. Shap Urban, or now simply Shap

Shap

Shap is a linear village and civil parish located amongst fells and isolated dales in Eden district, Cumbria, England. The village lies along the A6 road and the West Coast Main Line, and is near to the M6 motorway...

, was administered by an urban district

Urban district

In the England, Wales and Ireland, an urban district was a type of local government district that covered an urbanised area. Urban districts had an elected Urban District Council , which shared local government responsibilities with a county council....

 council from 1906 to 1935. Shap and Shap Rural today have a joint parish council.

Major landowners in the parish are the Lowther Family

Earl of Lonsdale

Earl of Lonsdale is a title that has been created twice in British history, firstly in the Peerage of Great Britain in 1784 , and then in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1807, both times for members of the Lowther family....

 Estates and United Utilities

United Utilities

United Utilities Group PLC is the UK's largest listed water business. The Group owns and manages the regulated water and waste water network in the north west England, through it subsidiary United Utilities Water PLC , which is responsible for the vast majority of the group's assets and...

.

Junction 39 of the M6 motorway

M6 motorway

The M6 motorway runs from junction 19 of the M1 at the Catthorpe Interchange, near Rugby via Birmingham then heads north, passing Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester, Preston, Carlisle and terminating at the Gretna junction . Here, just short of the Scottish border it becomes the A74 which continues to...

 lies within the parish.

Shapbeck Limestone

Limestone

Limestone is a sedimentary rock composed largely of the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate . Many limestones are composed from skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral or foraminifera....

 quarry

Quarry

A quarry is a type of open-pit mine from which rock or minerals are extracted. Quarries are generally used for extracting building materials, such as dimension stone, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, and gravel. They are often collocated with concrete and asphalt plants due to the requirement...

 owned by Hanson plc

Hanson plc

Hanson plc is a British based international building materials company, headquartered in Maidenhead. Traded on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index for many years, the company was acquired by a division of German rival Heidelberg Cement in August 2007.-History:Hanson...

 is in the northern part of the parish though the Hardendale Corus

Corus Group

Tata Steel Europe is a multinational steel-making company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the second-largest steel-maker in Europe and is a subsidiary of Tata Steel of India, one of the ten largest steel producers in the world.Corus Group was formed through the merger of Koninklijke...

 limestone quarry and works and the famous Cemex

Cemex

CEMEX is the world's largest building materials supplier and third largest cement producer. Founded in Mexico in 1906, the company is based in Monterrey, Mexico...

 (formerly RMC) Shap Granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

 quarries and works are within both Shap Rural and Shap parishes.

The cottage owned by Uncle Monty in the cult 1986 film Withnail & I is located by the reservoir at Wet Sleddale.