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Light fantastic in Yorkshire

This week’s Yorkshire Dales photo diary is jam-packed — with pictures rather than comment. The Yorkshire light can be particularly good at this time of year and even though I’ve been busy with other things, I’ve managed to get out for the odd hour or so to capture some superb conditions.

The sun and the cat got me up early Monday so a quick stroll around the village beckoned. The frontages of three-storey cottages on Langcliffe’s green glowed in the early morning light – it was chilly but bright. On the mill pond two ducks danced in the sun and an abandoned boat conjured up a Famous Five adventure.

In the afternoon I took a short journey into my past. In my early 20s I’d tried some caving and potholing – I wasn’t particularly taken by the sport… views are more thing. Anyway, I walked up to Alum Pot and Long Churn caves near Selside to jog my memory of some of those early underground exploits.

I’d not remembered the stunning views to be had from this spot. The sound of water echoing inside the black holes out on the lonely moors does nothing to entice me into taking up the sport again.

Anyone else think that the dead tree looks like one of those things from a Pepperoni advert trying to escape over the wall surrounding Alum Pot?

The evening promised a good sunset so I visited Winskill. I wasn’t disappointed. There are good silhouettes of the folding hills to be seen here, and the trees growing out of the limestone offer some special foregrounds.

The Yorkshire twilight on Wednesday was gorgeous, too. These trees – on the old road between Clapham and Ingleton – caught my eye as they glowed vividly in the low red sun.

As the sun began to set Moughton took on a red tinge, then it disappeared somewhere over Lancashire behind Robin Procter’s Scar.

Yorkshire drive

I needed an hour away from the computer on Thursday so I headed up to Newby Head for a quick walk up the Pennine Bridleway which follows one of the former drovers route to Coal Road, with branches off to Arten Gill and Widdale.

Looking from here it’s tempting to assume that the name Widdale stems from it being a ‘wide dale’ but that would be wrong. The name means ‘wood dale’ for it was once covered with trees. The trees were gradually stripped out for grazing. Many will remember the dale being replanted with conifers but most of these have gone, too, apart from a few pockets which help with the spread of red squirrels across the area. New native trees are being planted now and future generations will be able to see Widdale nearer to how it was hundreds of years ago.

One hour turned into two as I stopped to admire the views in all directions… towards Dent, across Widdale to Dodd Fell and down to Wensleydale, and also to Penyghent and Ingleborough. Fine Yorkshire Dales all round me. That distant purple mist never really burnt off to leave a clear blue sky – but that can also be magical (see first pic in blog).

Peewits flying overhead, trying to guide me away from their nests, were making the only noise I heard.
Sadly, that’s all I had time for this week but mustn’t grumble – I could be stuck in the middle of London.

Owt good on telly tonight, Dickie?

A wet week, but who cares – London’s okay

Train tannoy: “Ladies and gentlemen… as we cross the famous Ribblehead Viaduct, on your left you will see absolutely nothing; on your right, there is a very wet bloke with a camera.” Walking round Ribblehead when the rain is traveling sideways, you quickly learn which items of your gear warrant an all-weather tag. I hope Santa is well prepared, because there’s going to be a lengthy ‘I want’ list from me. My ‘fully waterproof’ bag ended up with a puddle in it – at least I can confirm the bottom doesn’t leak. (By Friday many trains along the Settle-Carlisle route were cancelled due to flooding. At one point in the Eden Valley the river was over a mile wide.)

A brief respite from the rain on Friday tempted me out to do a little long-exposure photography – not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but a useful skill to learn properly. There was probably a bit too much water, flowing too quickly, down Clapham Falls to get a satisfactory ‘silky’ effect. But while in the village I couldn’t stop myself taking the stock photo across old Brokken Bridge. This scene always makes a good in autumn or winter photo.

This tiny waterfall in the former quarry at Ribblehead appears quite angelic and there’s even a shrouded figure merging. I did the short ‘green’ walk around the Ingleborough National Nature Reserve (which includes the quarry). Although the tops of Ingleborough and Whernside were shrouded in cloud, Penyghent could still be seen beyond Gauber and Colt Park.

I was so bored during the poor weather this week that I actually started to sort out a cupboard where books and other bits had been tossed when I first moved into the house. I soon stopped though when I came across a 1920s guide book to Ingleton. It’s a fascinating window into life ninety years ago. In those days tourists flocked to this part of the world mainly by rail and charabanc – but increasingly by road, as reflected by the adverts and editorial. There were once two railway stations serving the village – one, run by Midland Railway company, was where the village community centre now is in the car park, and the other was at the Thornton side about a mile away, operated by London & North Western. At one time, to change trains from one operator to the other, passengers could pay a penny fare to cross the viaduct between the two stations and enjoy the view.
You can view the whole leaflet by clicking on the link below. (Press esc to return to this page if viewing on computer.)

If you’re on a mobile click here to view the Ingleton Guide

NB I have tried to check copyright details on this publication. The publishers, Ingleton Advertisers Association, no longer exist. If anyone knows of a copyright holder please let me know and I will gladly acknowledge them.

Yesterday afternoon I took an exhilarating short walk with Desmond (the storm, not a new friend) around Langcliffe. I thought, once you’re wet it doesn’t really matter does it? The route of my regular jaunt by the Ribble is usually alongside the river bank… there appeared to be this small puddle in the way so I gave it a miss.

Having my regular walk disrupted is, of course, a minor inconvenience compared with the problems being caused by Storm Desmond. Some of the flooding in the region and further north is catastrophic for many people and will affect their lives for many months, if not years. The government is willing to spend millions every night on bombing Iraq and Syria in the belief this will protect us against terrorists, but it has actually held back money for properly protecting some towns and villages in the North West from flooding. But then again, it wasn’t London under attack from Mother Nature was it, just those uncouth tribes of the North.

Feedback

Talking of uncouth, I’d like to say to an old friend that his suggestion for the origin of the name Braithwaite Wife Hole, is totally wrong and uncalled-for. My thanks to those others who tried to decently explain the sinkhole’s name mentioned in last week’s blog. In what must be one of the longest book titles going (‘A descriptive tour and guide to the lakes, caves, mountains and other natural curiosities in Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire’) John Housman, writing in 1800, calls it Barefoot-wives’ Hole. This name is also found in West’s Guide to the Lakes, 1778/1821 and on old maps dating as far back as 1760. A map of 1890, however, shows the name has been changed to Braithwaite Wife Shake Hole. Just like with many place-names and surnames, early scribes often misunderstood local terms and accents when it came to writing down terms that had previously been passed down through generations of verbal history, so perhaps the original name will remain a mystery – unless you know differently.

Changing scenes, honours and farewells

I didn’t know until this week that someone could become a ‘honorary Yorkshireman’. The old notion that unless your Yorkshire lineage stretched back as far as the Viking invasion you were, and always will be, considered as an offcumden, seems to have been chucked out with the bath water. On Monday, a bloke called Gary Barlow was awarded the distinction of Yorkshireman at what appears to have been a very un-Yorkshire-like OTT event put on by the Welcome to Yorkshire tourist organisation. Apparently, this Barlow fellow was once part of a popular beat-combo ensemble called Take That, and his credentials for being upgraded from Ordinary Cheshire Chap to Honorary Yorkshireman is due to him writing songs about our Calendar Girls. Now I’m not knocking Welcome to Yorkshire, who do a splendid job promoting the county, but I wonder if they are overstepping their jurisdiction here. Just who has the right to declare someone as being ‘Yorkshire’? And surely a pie and pea supper followed by a bingo session at a village hall would have been a more appropriate occasion to bestow such recognition? I wonder if Mr Barlow (Hon Yks) is now advocating a change of name to ‘Teck That Pal’?

Top picture: a giant caterpillar crawls out of the mist over the Settle landscape this week.

I attended the memorial service to a real Yorkshireman on Tuesday when the folk of Settle and district paid their respects to the late Bill Mitchell at St John’s. Bill attended the chapel for many years and was also a lay Methodist preacher in the district. The place was packed – he will certainly be missed in these parts but thankfully he leaves a great legacy.

I was itching to get out into the Dales by Thursday, and with the forecasters saying there could be some sunshine in the morning I found myself heading up Penyghent early doors. Just a quick trip up-and-down the pointy bit, starting from Dalehead Farm on the Stainforth to Halton Gill road. The forecasters didn’t mention there would be intermittent sun/cloud, which led to scene changes happening every few minutes. I got all the way to the top without meeting another soul, and ate my chocolate digestives alone beside a very windswept and mist-covered trig point. Neighbouring Fountains Fell was completely enveloped by cloud, while the view down Ribblesdale offered little by way of photography. You can just about recognise distant Littondale in the above picture during a brief cloud break-up.

In his lovely book, Summat and Nowt, Bill Mitchell says Penyghent from this angle looks like a marooned whale. He continues: “From the west it takes on the appearance of a recumbent lion with splendid mane. The nose-end enhances the view from the Ribble bridge between Settle and Giggleswick. A local philosopher spent so long contemplating this view that someone asked him what great thoughts had been going through his mind. He replied: ‘I was just thinking how much Penyghent resembles an upturned pudding dish’.”

I sometimes see the great hill as a partly-eaten layer cake. On Friday it looked like icing sugar had been sprinkled over (above). Last weekend those Met Office types had predicted snow on them thar hills by the end of the week. There was the aforementioned light coating on Penyghent and also on Whernside, but nothing on Ingleborough by the time I drove down Chapel-le-Dale.

Regular readers will know of my fascination for changing light in the Dales – and are probably fed up to the back teeth with me mentioning it – however, my passion was satisfied once more near Ingleton as the clouds parted and the landscape around Twisleton Scar briefly lit up. The spectacle is difficult to capture on a still photo and I wish I’d set the camera to video mode:

I continued my journey home through Clapham along the old back road to find the village’s normally sedate falls sporting a whole new persona following the heavy rain. This time I did switch to video – there’s a 23-second movie here:
https://youtu.be/r_gqtnNMke0
If you can’t be bothered with going to Youtube for a video then here’s a still…

As I take in the beauty and peace of the Dales countryside I often wonder who will look after it for future generations, thus allowing them to do likewise. Judging by the actions of some fellow human beings recently, I can’t help but think we are still too primitive a species to be left in charge of this beautiful, fragile planet. We kill each other indiscriminately instead of adequately pooling wealth, resources and knowledge; we exterminate plants, birds and animals which keep Nature in balance; we continually destroy and exploit natural assets for selfish gain. Does anyone actually know what – if there is one – the long-term goal is for humanity? Sometimes it’s difficult not to feel depressed about such issues. Thankfully I’m lucky enough to live in a peaceful part of the world and still have the freedom and ability to enjoy and appreciate its precious gifts.

Meanwhile, the rain continues to pour down here in Ribblesdale. Time to put on the waterproofs and see how my part of the world is coping…

WARNING: there will be weather in the Dales

Wednesday: Checked the weather via my iPad. Taken aback to see a great big exclamation mark in a triangle with WARNING written underneath in large capital letters. My first thoughts were of nuclear clouds raining down those nasty radioactive thingies. Should I stock up on food for the cat? Have I time to build a shelter? Is my will up to date? Then I saw ‘Yellow alert’. Phew! Perhaps I have a few hours to prepare to face the approaching catastrophe. I read a little further about mankind’s impending doom: rain. Rain? I read it again. It’s going to rain. I live in the Dales, in the north of England, of course it’s going to rain. That’s what it does here … on a regular basis. We have rivers, and streams, and waterfalls … they exist because of the rain. I tossed the iPad aside in disgust and pondered why ‘they’ have to make everything into such a drama, another soap opera. I put on my waterproofs (like you do when it rains) and ventured out to witness the predicted scenes of nightmarish destruction and see how the masses were facing up to this Armageddon…

One of my favourite places after a ‘little downpour’ is on the foothills of Penyghent along the Silverdale Road to Halton Gill around Giant’s Grave. As you walk across one of the fields here you can hear – and feel – the water rumbling its way through underground caverns before it rushes out to fill the normally placid beck. Above the road, Penyghent was hiding behind a curtain of cloud.

Down in Stainforth the swollen beck submerged the stepping stones, while at the Foss any hopes salmon had of making their journey up to the spawning grounds today were thwarted by this torrent. A short video here https://youtu.be/Jze79UvfCP0

A Stainforth chap, who knows I live in neighbouring Langcliffe, spotted me loitering suspiciously in his village and asked to see my passport. I said I’d applied for it and it was obviously lost in the post. I was allowed in temporarily – you can’t be too careful about border crossings nowadays. For his benefit I’ve rewritten an old Dales verse, reminding him that we in Langcliffe are indeed worthy visitors on his turf:

There are things they do at Stainforth,
In Settle and Horton too,
That we who live in Langcliffe
Would rather die than do.
With Giggleswick’s behaviour
We don’t see eye to eye,
for the moral tone of Langcliffe
Is very, very high.
___________
My photo diary allows me to compare the seasons year on year. Locally, October so far hasn’t been much different from last year. I took the top photo in the blog on 12 October 2014 on The Highway, between Langcliffe and Settle, and the scene was similar when I walked along this quiet back-road yesterday (excluding the anonymous models whom I thank for making that picture more interesting).

I also grabbed some smart sunsets in 2014, and last Sunday the sky drew me out again for a little wander around Helwith Bridge. At first I couldn’t decide if above me were vapour trails leading to and from Manchester Airport but I learned later that they were clouds, possibly Cirrus Radiatus. There have been some great atmospheric conditions in the dale…

_________
We interrupt this blog for an important public announcement
[Insert large exclamation mark inside triangle here]
WARNING LYCRA ALERT
It’s been announced that Settle will be one of six host towns in next year’s Tour o’ Yorkshire (what’s all this ‘de’ nonsense? We’ll be eating garlic next). Do not enter the town next April if you are allergic to Lycra or offended by people wearing skin-tight luminous clothing. Please don’t stare at their nether regions as it only encourages them.

________

The weirs at Langcliffe (pictured below) and Settle looked much calmer yesterday than they had done earlier in the week, and I’m told that salmon have now been seen heading upstream.

Even the footballers donned autumn colours for their match by the Ribble in Settle.

_________________

Sadly, events this week have been over-shadowed by the death of friend and former work colleague Bill Mitchell MBE. He died peacefully in hospital on Wednesday night aged 87. Bill contributed to Dalesman Publishing Company (later Country Publications) for more than 60 years, doing everything from delivering copies of magazines to editing them, as well as writing books. When he retired as editor in 2008 he continued to write (more than 200 books in all) from his home in Giggleswick and freely gave talks and lectures. Many of his early interviews and recordings are in the process of being digitised for future generations to enjoy and learn from (www.settlestories.org.uk) and an archive of his work and collections is stored at Bradford University.
Bill was a modest man; he won many awards and accolades but I don’t recall him ever mentioning them in my company. He didn’t write for vanity or to amass wealth – he just wanted to record life as it really happened. When I sat with him for tea and biscuits – before his lovely wife Freda died it was gorgeous home-made cakes and tea – he would take me through a maze of stories, anecdotes and one liners, often with broad Yorkshire phrases thrown in for good measure. The stories never centred around him, they were about the people he’d met, the places he’d been, Nature, life and tradition. The mark of a good editor and writer is the ability to know and supply exactly what the reader wants. Bill achieved this in an unfussy, informative and entertaining way. He will never be replaced and I feel privileged to have known him.

The picture is one I took of Bill when we visited the original home of Dalesman in 2008. He’s stood on Brokken Bridge in Clapham. The top house of the row on the left is Fellside, which the magazine’s founder, Harry Scott, rented and used as a home and office from 1939 to 1955. The owners kindly let us in, and Bill reminisced about his time there.

It's all Nature's fault

A major fault led to my best moments this week. I’m talking about the Craven Fault, caused by a prehistoric act of Nature which created some of the country’s most magnificent and intriguing landscapes. A walk following the fault-line from Clapham in the west to Grassington in the east would surely be one of the most spectacular trails in Yorkshire – over to you, trailblazers. I trod two sections this week – the first from near Feizor across to Giggleswick Scar where views down Ribblesdale and the floodplain early evening on Tuesday were exceptional.

On Friday I walked the Settle Loop – part of the Pennine Bridleway – which includes views of the fault-line over Malham and Malham Moor. For me though, the tiny valley of Stockdale provides one of the greatest panoramas. Heading from the Malham direction, the Settle Loop reaches the top of Stockdale and squeezes between the Rye Loaf Hill and the limestone scars of Attermire and Langcliffe. Here Warrendale Knots stand guard on the border between limestone and gritstone, and here the grand sweeping valleys of Ribblesdale and Airedale open up before you. Being there on a warm summer’s day certainly makes you feel glad to be alive.

(That’s not me in the picture – hope you don’t mind whoever you are.) Back to Sunday … after I’d written last week’s blog the day brightened up so I drove to Selside and a nice little photo spot near the start of the track to Alum Pot. Here Penyghent is perfectly framed by the trees which somehow grow from the limestone pavement.

On Monday I strolled from the village up to Winskill to find that one of my favourite pointy-signpost-photo-foregrounds had been switched for a short stumpy little effort. I suppose it helps open up the view a bit but I like signs that have place-names on them. Perhaps the authorities have been instructed to remove all signs containing names because there’s an imminent invasion threat?

I got the rare urge to desert the Dales on Wednesday and use my senior railcard on a trip to York. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the holidaying population of the UK and beyond had decided on the same destination. As you’ll gather, I’m not one for crowds but the experience was bearable thanks to the many attractions of this magnificent little city, and I saw many sights and heard sounds I’d never normally come across back home …

With the sun still having its hat on yesterday I walked up to Castleberg Rock to take a panoramic view of Settle and Giggleswick. I made a very short video with my normal camera – something I’m not very good at, as you’ll see here …

Serpent of the Dales

I spotted this rare two-horned dinglewart tree serpent near Ingleborough during my break in the Dales this afternoon. Its tongue, horns, protruding fang, right eye and ear are clearly visible and you certainly wouldn’t want to come across one of these things in fading light. They feast on dinglewarts, an endangered species of small furry mammal which are now confined to this corner of Yorkshire and also a tiny section of Peruvian rain forest. Locals tell of an evil curse surrounding the slithering serpent:
If into the serpent’s eyes you stare,
Grey will become your head of hair.
And should the serpent not be fed,
Into cowclap you will tread.

I’ve already suffered that indignity this week and my hair couldn’t get much greyer so I scarpered quickly and took this photo of Ingleborough through autumn trees at St Leonard’s, Chapel-le-Dale.

Tag: Clapham

Light fantastic in Yorkshire

Yorkshire drive

Owt good on telly tonight, Dickie?

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A wet week, but who cares – London’s okay

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Changing scenes, honours and farewells

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WARNING: there will be weather in the Dales

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It's all Nature's fault

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Serpent of the Dales

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Yorkshire drive

Owt good on telly tonight, Dickie?

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