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

      INTRODUCTION

      The Yorkshire Dales is like nowhere else in England, a place of intrinsic and striking beauty that owes its scenic qualities both to Nature and to Man. Bestriding the central Pennines, that broad range of hills erupting along the middle of the country and known to generations of schoolchildren as the ‘backbone of England’, it boasts a diversity of landscape and character that is hard to beat. Walkers trudging up the Pennine Way from the south into Craven leave the sombre mill valleys fragmenting the desolate, weather-beaten moors of West Yorkshire and East Lancashire to be greeted by a brighter, more intimate scene of interwoven horizons. Rolling green hills, broken here and there by rugged scars of white limestone, rise to a distant, higher ground dissected by deepening valleys. Further east and to the north, the wild moors dominate, but even here a varied geology of underlying rock breaks up their melancholic uniformity.

      It is perhaps perverse that, as an upland region, the Yorkshire Dales is named after its most low-lying elements. But, like the neighbouring Lake District, it is this complementary feature that determines its endearing uniqueness. Just as the Cumbrian mountains would be the less without scintillating tarns and lakes to reflect their awesome ruggedness, the character of the Dales hills relies on the gentle beauty that rises up from the long, deep and twisting valleys emanating from the core. Devoid of the dramatic impact of soaring peaks, knife edge ridges and great hanging valleys, the mountains here might otherwise be regarded as unremarkable with little to distinguish them from the other hills of the Pennine range, but their intimacy with the gentle valleys that they enclose is what truly sets them apart.