Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: North and East. Dennis Kelsall
Fell
Part 3 Swaledale and Arkengarthdale
Walk 13 Apedale and Harkerside Moor
Walk 14 Grinton and Maiden Castle
Walk 15 Fremington Edge
Walk 16 Slei Gill
Walk 17 Whaw to Dale Head
Walk 18 Old Gang and Surrender
Walk 19 Beside the River Swale from Gunnerside
Walk 20 Gunnerside Gill
Walk 21 Ivelet Bridge from Muker
Walk 22 Great Shunner Fell and Lovely Seat from Thwaite
Walk 23 Muker, Thwaite and Kisdon Force from Keld
Walk 24 Whitsundale and the head of the River Swale
Part 4 Wensleydale and Coverdale
Walk 25 A walk in Coverdale
Walk 26 West Witton and the River Ure to Redmire Force
Walk 27 Aysgarth to West Burton
Walk 28 Aysgarth Falls
Walk 29 Ivy Scar from Aysgarth
Walk 30 Whitfield Gill Force and Mill Gill Falls
Walk 31 The Wensleydale railway and River Ure stepping-stones
Walk 32 The Wensleydale railway and Skell Gill
Walk 33 Bainbridge to Semer Water
Walk 34 Aysgill Force
Walk 35 Dodd Fell Hill and Drumaldrace
Walk 36 Cotterdale
Walk 37 Great Shunner Fell from Hardraw
Walk 38 The High Way
Walk 39 Brimham Rocks
Walk 40 Ashfold Side
Walk 41 Middlesmoor and How Stean Gorge
Walk 42 Nidderdale
Walk 43 Little Whernside
APPENDIX A Route summaries and suggestions for longer routes
APPENDIX B Where to find out more
INTRODUCTION
Looking beyond Keld to distant Lovely Seat (Walk 24)
THE DALES LANDSCAPE
The Yorkshire Dales is like nowhere else in England, a place of intrinsic and striking beauty that owes its scenic qualities both to nature and to man. Bestriding the central Pennines, that broad range of hills erupting along the middle of the country, and known to generations of schoolchildren as the ‘backbone of England’, the Dales boasts a diversity of landscape and character that is hard to beat.
Walkers trudging up the Pennine Way from the south into Craven leave the sombre mill valleys that fragment the desolate, weather-beaten moors of West Yorkshire and East Lancashire to be greeted by a brighter, more intimate scene of interwoven horizons. Rolling green hills, broken here and there by rugged scars of white limestone, rise to a distant, higher ground dissected by deepening valleys. Further east and to the north, the wild moors dominate, but even here a varied geology of underlying rock breaks up their melancholic uniformity.
It is perhaps perverse that, as an upland region, the Yorkshire Dales is named after its most low-lying elements. But, like the neighbouring Lake District, it is this complementary feature that determines its endearing uniqueness. Just as the Cumbrian mountains would be the less without scintillating tarns and lakes to reflect their awesome ruggedness, the character of the Dales hills relies on the gentle beauty that rises up from the long, deep and twisting valleys emanating from the core. Devoid of the dramatic impact of soaring peaks, knife-edge ridges and great hanging valleys, the mountains here might otherwise be regarded as unremarkable, with little to distinguish them from the other hills of the Pennine range, but their intimacy with the gentle valleys that they enclose is what truly sets them apart.
Field barns are a feature of the Wensleydale pastures (Walk 30)
Despite the steep gradients that act as boundaries between the upper moors and the lowlands, it is often hard to define where the one begins and the other ends. Stroll in rich water meadows beside a serpentine river flowing in a flat-bottomed valley, or stride upon an airy plateau beneath vast, open skies, and there is little doubt where you are. But walk from one to the other and the transition is often quite subtle. In many places, the neatly walled grazing pastures of the lower valleys climb high up the slope, sometimes intermingled with variegated woodlands that soften the craggy steps. In their higher reaches, the valley bottoms can often feel utterly remote from the rest of the world, and have an untamed complexion that is more akin to the uplands. On the wildest of the tops, great morasses of peat hag and bog might stretch for miles, but even here the tendrils of the ubiquitous stone walls are never far away, encompassing bleak tracts of land and signifying a belonging to some farm settlement in the valley far below.
Ancient trackways and paths ignore these geographical divisions, and connect this dale to that, or lead up to small mines and quarries that were often as integral to a farming income as the cows’ milk and ewes’ wool. Although the contours of the land mean that summits are rarely visible from the valley floor, and vice versa, for much of the way in between, the wider views encompass them both. And it is from this perspective that the two really do come together to be appreciated as a single entity – the Yorkshire Dales.
Set between the Stainmoor and Aire gaps north and south, the Lune Valley in the west, and running out onto the great expanse of the Vale of York to the east, the Dales covers a relatively compact area of upland plateau fragmented by a number of main valley systems. The tumbling rivers of the Swale, Ure, Nidd, Wharfe and Aire all unite in the River Ouse, which, meeting the Trent, becomes the Humber as it runs into the North Sea. The Ribble, together with those streams gathered by the peripheral Lune, finds its freedom to the west in the Irish Sea, while Mallerstang alone drains northward along the Eden Valley to Carlisle and the Solway Firth. Feeding these main rivers is a multitude of lesser ones that gnaw deep into the heartland, creating a maze of smaller valleys and dales, each proclaiming its own subtly different character.
West Close Barn in Sleddale (Walk 34)
This variance is rooted in underlying geology and positional geography, and is also the product of elemental forces, but important too is the way man has settled and exploited the Dales over millennia. Farming, husbandry, woodland management, quarrying and mining have all left their mark on the slopes, and here, at least, it can be said that the cumulative efforts of