The Yorkshire Dales became a national park in 1954. A dale is simply a valley — the word is Norse, like most place names here — and the park is essentially a series of them radiating out from the central Pennine watershed: Wensleydale, Swaledale, Wharfedale, Ribblesdale, Malhamdale and a dozen more.
The limestone
Everything here is shaped by carboniferous limestone, and it produces landforms found almost nowhere else in England:
- Limestone pavement — bare rock split by rainwater into blocks (clints) and fissures (grikes). The pavement above Malham Cove is the finest example in Britain, and rare ferns grow in the shaded cracks.
- Malham Cove — a curving 80-metre cliff that was once a waterfall higher than Niagara. Peregrine falcons nest on it.
- Gordale Scar — a deep ravine with a waterfall, painted by Turner and much admired by the Romantics.
- Caves and potholes — the limestone is riddled with them. Gaping Gill has a shaft deep enough to contain St Paul’s Cathedral, and is winched open to the public twice a year.
- Waterfalls — Aysgarth Falls, Hardraw Force and the Ingleton Waterfalls Trail.
The walls and barns
The Dales are the most intensively walled landscape in Britain. Thousands of miles of dry stone wall divide the valley floors into small fields, and among them stand around 5,000 stone field barns — one to a field, each built to overwinter a few cattle and store the hay cut from that field.
The system made sense when farming was done by hand. It makes no economic sense now, and the barns are expensive to maintain and largely redundant, which is why their survival depends on conservation grants. Swaledale, where they are densest, is the landscape most people picture when they picture the Dales.
The Three Peaks
Pen-y-ghent (694m), Whernside (736m) and Ingleborough (723m). Walking all three in under twelve hours — around 24 miles with 1,600m of ascent — is the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge, attempted by tens of thousands of people a year.
The volume of traffic has caused serious erosion, and much of the route is now paved with flagstones recovered from demolished Lancashire mills. Note that this is a different challenge from the National Three Peaks, which involves the highest mountains in Scotland, England and Wales.
The Settle-Carlisle line
One of the great railway journeys in Britain, running 72 miles through the heart of the Dales. It crosses the Ribblehead Viaduct, 24 arches striding across open moorland below Whernside — built in the 1870s at the cost of around a hundred navvies’ lives.
British Rail tried to close the line in the 1980s. A public campaign saved it, and it is now a major visitor attraction in its own right.
Wensleydale
The dale gives its name to the crumbly white cheese, made at Hawes since 1897. The creamery was closed by its owners in 1992 and reopened by a management buyout after a local outcry — helped considerably by Wallace and Gromit, whose fondness for Wensleydale had lifted sales enormously and was entirely coincidental.
All Creatures Great and Small
James Herriot’s books, based on his life as a vet in Thirsk, and their television adaptations have shaped the international image of the Dales more than anything else. The recent series is filmed largely around Grassington, which now receives a substantial number of visitors as a direct result.