Great Mountain Days in the Pennines. Terry Marsh
Kirk Yetholm, than when they began the day.
Pennine Way signpost
From the small car park, turn right and follow the road through the village. At the bottom of a dip, the Pennine Way is signposted and leads up along the lane to Bow Hall Farm, set on gently sloping pastures. There is invariably a red flag mounted at the entrance to Bow Hall Lane, signifying activity on the Warcop Artillery Range, part of the Warcop Principal Training Area.
Firing on the artillery range is unlikely to affect anyone ascending to High Cup Nick, but walkers tempted to stray onto Murton Fell could be walking into trouble. Activity, with no concession to walkers, occurs every day except Mondays.
The onward route beyond Bow Hall lies along a walled green lane, and beyond climbs high onto the hillside. On passing through the intake wall, the views open up across the Eden valley to the fells of Lakeland and southwards to the Howgills. The path eases up to a sheepfold. Pass through this, and a short way on enter a natural hollow with a large cairn at its centre, just below Peeping Hill. From here, take the high route up to a cairn, from where the ongoing Pennine Way route is clear throughout.
Continue easily along the edge of a developing escarpment, which drops in precipitous green slopes to unseen High Cup Gill. As the gill narrows, so the scenery assumes a more inspiring and dramatic aspect, and the Pennine Way, crossing a couple of cascading streams, then relaxes to form a gentle greenway around the craggy amphitheatre to the Pennine watershed ahead. The path, as if possessing no head for heights, maintains a respectable distance from the escarpment, but as the crags become more evident a cautious diversion will reveal an architecture of shattered pinnacles and precarious columns of basalt.
Nichol’s Chair
High Cup Head
The most notable of these pinnacles and columns, Nichol’s Chair, is named after a cobbler who used to live in Dufton, and who not only climbed the pillar but is reputed to have repaired a pair of boots while on its top. Any ascent now runs the risk of precipitating the collapse of the whole column.
For all its comparative lack of stature, the stream that flows (sometimes) lemming-like over High Cup Nick will, when caught by a westerly wind, often plume high into the air, reminiscent of Kinder Downfall in the Peak District, and nearby folds in the grassy shoulder of the escarpment offer lunch-time shelter. While recovering from the effort required to reach this point, it’s worth bearing in mind that the best fell-runners start in Dufton and come up to High Cup Nick, and back down, in just a fraction over one hour!
High Cup Nick is a classic U-shaped valley on the western flanks of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. A deep chasm on the Pennine fellside, this famous geological formation at the top of High Cup Gill is part of the Whin Sill and overlooks the best glaciated valley in northern England, displaying grey-blue dolerite crags of the type that also form High Force and Cauldron Snout.
Here the walk leaves the Pennine Way, which presses on eastwards to Cauldron Snout and into Teesdale. To continue to Backstone Edge, about-face to ascend the easy grassy slopes north-east of Narrowgate Beacon, which has overlooked much of the route thus far and is crowned by a large cairn.
From the beacon there are two choices: one (shown on the map) to pursue an intermittent gritstone edge around the lip of the high moors; the other to tackle a section of bogs, giving way eventually to heather and tussock grass. A clear day in winter, when the ground underfoot is frozen in its grip, may well be the best time to tackle these featureless moors; following prolonged rain is certainly the worst.
The immediate objective of both routes is the trig pillar west of Seamore Tarn, a lonely sentinel in an austere landscape made auspicious by its position on the watershed of Britain, for here the waters of Little Rundale Tarn gush westwards to the Eden and on to the Solway, while those of nearby Seamore and Great Rundale tarns empty to the North Sea. The highest point of Backstone Edge lies a short way north-east of the trig, marked by a cairn of large boulders.
Hidden from the summit, the return route follows the deep valley of Rundale, which sports a broad track that descends from the col with High Scald Fell along the line of Great Rundale Beck to Dufton. Quarry workings are shortly encountered, relics of the search for barytes.
Wild and rugged, and despoiled by man, Great Rundale is less open than High Cup Gill, the view westwards restricted by the pyramid of Dufton Pike, one of a number of distinctly different little summits dotted along the western side of the Pennines here. These are actually formed from older, Ordovician (formed 495–440 million years ago) and Silurian (440–415 million years) Lake District rocks, which elsewhere have been overlaid with those of the Carboniferous period (350–290 million years old).
But for all the damage that has been done in Great Rundale’s upper reaches, the lower valley is quite a charming end to the day. On approaching Dufton Pike, pass south of it on a broad track, finally to regain Dufton not far from the starting point.
Dufton Pike: the walk concludes along the track across its base
WALK FIVE
Cauldron Snout and Widdybank Fell
| Start point | Cow Green Reservoir NY811309 |
| Distance | 13km (8 miles) |
| Height gain | 145m (475ft) |
| Grade | moderate |
| Time | 4–5hrs |
| Maps | Ordnance Survey OL31 (North Pennines: Teesdale and Weardale) |
| Getting there | Weelhead Sike car park |
| After-walk refreshment | Pub at Langdon Beck and along the B6277 to Middleton-in-Teesdale, where there are also cafés |
Anyone who visualises the Pennines as dark, gritstone-bound uplands of peat bog and bleakness will be heartily surprised by this circuit of Widdybank Fell. It lies within a spectacular National Nature Reserve, one of great importance, and is a delight to explore. The walk takes in the powerful falls at Cauldron Snout, and then uses the Pennine Way alongside the River Tees, and these treats offset the hard-surface walking that concludes the walk.
Cauldron Snout
The Route
Once a remote corner of the North Riding of Yorkshire and part of the ancient Forest of Teesdale in which deer roamed freely, the landscape this walk crosses is now embraced within the Moor House–Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve. Apart from a little awkwardness scrambling down beside Cauldron Snout and a few short sections crossing boulders, the walking is easy throughout.
From the car park overlooking Cow Green Reservoir, way up on the moorland of Widdybank Fell, an undistinguished summit that the walk encircles, walk back along the road to a signed path on the right for Cauldron Snout (NY813308) and here leave the road. When the path intercepts a track, turn left briefly to a gate on the right giving into the Nature Reserve.
Stretching across the upper reaches of the River Tees, the Moor House – Upper Teesdale National Nature Reserve comprises 8800 ha and embraces an extensive range of upland habitats typical of the North Pennines. These include hay meadows, rough grazing and juniper woods, as well as limestone grassland, blanket bogs and summit heaths on the high fells. What makes Upper Teesdale so important is that nowhere else in Britain is there such a diversity of rare habitats in one setting.
The reserve is renowned for the plants that originally colonised the high Pennines after the last Ice Age (about 10,000 years ago) and have survived here ever since. There are also rare rock formations, such as outcropping sugar limestone and the Great