Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: South and West. Dennis Kelsall

      A feeling of remoteness in the Valley of Desolation (Walk 3)

      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 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 Yorkshire Vale to the east, the Dales cover 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, find their freedom to the west in the Irish Sea, while Mallerstang alone drains northward along the Eden Valley to Carlisle and the Solway Firth. Feeding them is a multitude of lesser rivers that gnaw deep into the heartland, creating a maze of smaller valleys and dales each proclaiming its own subtly different character. This variance is rooted in underlying geology, positional geography and the product of elemental forces, but important too is the way man has settled and exploited them over millennia. Farming, husbandry, woodland management, quarrying and mining have all left their mark upon the slopes; and, here at least, it can be said that the accumulative effort of successive generations has unconsciously helped in the creation of one of the loveliest landscapes in the country.