Limestone underfoot, dry-stone walls over every hill, and the Three Peaks a standing dare to try all of them in a day
Two things make this stretch of Yorkshire look the way it does: limestone and centuries of walling. The rock surfaces in scars and pavement wherever the soil thins, and the walls run over every visible hill, dividing land that was never going to grow much beyond grass and sheep. Barns dot the fields at oddly regular intervals, a legacy of a farming system that kept hay close to the cattle that needed it.
Three summits give the area its best-known challenge, the Three Peaks walk, though none of that particular trio sit in this corner of the park’s higher ground; they lie further west. What’s here instead is its own decent spread of fells: Buckden Pike, Great Whernside — not to be confused with its more famous near-namesake — and Great Shunner Fell, a long whaleback of a hill with a view across most of the park on a clear day. Fountains Fell sits closer to the classic route and gets walked as a warm-up more often than a destination in its own right.
Below the tops, the dales themselves do the scenery: Semerwater, reckoned one of only two natural lakes left in the Dales, and becks that drop off the limestone in a string of waterfalls after rain. Oughtershaw and Beckermonds marks where two infant becks meet to become the River Wharfe, unremarkable to look at and easy to miss.
Weather turns quickly on the open fell tops, and mobile signal drops out across most of the dales proper, so a paper map still beats a dead phone up here. Villages along Wharfedale and Wensleydale hold the practical stuff, parking, a pub, a shop, but they’re spread thin, so plan food and fuel before setting off rather than counting on passing something along the way.
