Yorkshire Dales

The Yorkshire Dales are Carboniferous limestone doing everything limestone can do: the 80-metre curved cliff of Malham Cove with its clint-and-gryke pavement on top (Wordsworth and Turner came for the neighbouring gorge of Gordale Scar; the film crews come for the Cove), the overhang of Kilnsey Crag, rivers that vanish into their beds and reappear miles later, and underneath it all the most cavernous ground in Britain — Gaping Gill's 110-metre shaft swallows a stream beside Ingleborough and opens into a chamber that would hold a cathedral, winched into by the public two bank-holiday weeks a year, while the Three Counties System under the western fells links close to a hundred kilometres of passage, the country's longest. Above ground the same geology arranges itself into the Three Peaks — Whernside, Ingleborough, Pen-y-ghent — whose 39-kilometre round has been a challenge walk since two schoolmasters raced the idea into existence in 1887. The park was designated in 1954 and pushed a quarter larger in 2016, west across the Lune watershed into Cumbria's Orton Fells and the northern Howgills.

The dales themselves — Wharfedale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, Ribblesdale, Dentdale, each with its own accent — are the built landscape the park exists to keep: a net of drystone walls climbing from river to moor, and thousands of stone field barns, densest in Swaledale around Muker, where the June hay meadows are among the last flower-rich ones in England. The wealth that walled it was monastic (Fountains ran granges through these valleys; Bolton Priory stands in Wharfedale) and then mineral: the northern dales are hollow with lead workings, and the smelt-mill flues and crushing floors of Gunnerside Gill make Swaledale's headwaters an open-air industrial museum. Wensleydale's contribution is edible — cheese made at Hawes since monks carried the recipe over from France, saved in the 1990s partly by Wallace and Gromit's on-screen devotion.

Cutting across all of it is the Settle–Carlisle, the most audacious railway in England: driven over the watershed in the 1870s by navvy armies whose shanty towns (and burial registers) surround Ribblehead, where the 24-arch viaduct strides the moss below Whernside; Dent station, at 350 metres England's highest on a main line, sits four miles from the village it names. Saved from closure by public revolt in 1989, it remains the park's spinal transport — a working main line that doubles as the best landscape viewing platform in the north.

What's worth knowing before you go

The Settle–Carlisle stations (Settle, Horton, Ribblehead, Dent, Garsdale) put the western dales on the rail map direct from Leeds; the eastern dales are DalesBus country, with Grassington, Hawes and Reeth as bases. Malham and the Three Peaks honeypots aside, emptiness is easily bought — Littondale, Dentdale and upper Swaledale absorb a summer Saturday without effort. Time the set pieces: Muker's meadows in the second half of June, Malham Cove's peregrines on the RSPB scopes in spring, Gaping Gill's winch meets around the May and August bank holidays (queue early), and Hardraw Force — England's tallest single-drop waterfall, reached through a pub — within days of rain. The Buttertubs Pass between Wensleydale and Swaledale is the drive; Hubberholme church, with its rare rood loft and J. B. Priestley's ashes, is the quiet detour that explains why he called Wharfedale the pleasantest place in the world.