The Office Day Out 17th July 2006 - Yorkshire Dales
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A nice drive up the beautiful
northern section of the M6 to junction 37, then along the A684 to
Sedbergh.
From Sedbergh it is only a short distance along the A683 to the path for Cautley Spout, a magnificent waterfall flowing over the edge of Cautley Crag This is the beck running from the waterfall as it passes near the A683, the picture is taken from the wooden bridge above. |
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Left The
walk to Cautley Spout
Right The view of Cautley Crag and Cautley Spout from the information board on the path. The waterfall is in the centre of the picture Below The nearest of the two hillocks in the valley is where the evidence of an iron age fort was found. |
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A short way along the path there
is an information board which gives a little information about the area.
The board tells how the glaciers altered the original landscape and
created the waterfall which is Cautley Spout and falls over the edge of Cautley Crag. The picture on the board is an artistic recreation of the
iron age hill fort which was on one of the hillocks in front of the
waterfall.
Now, I don't mean to be critical but: "2000 years ago they [the waterfalls] were admired by very different people" - isn't that a bit obvious? I don't know anyone that old! And: "what is unusual about this settlement is the fact that a stone-edged trackway leads from it straight toward the base of the falls then stops" - would you have built a roadway to the top of the crag alongside the waterfall? |
| Finally: "...it
looks as if the falls may have had some special significance for these
people." Water, perhaps? As the area is generally over
700ft it would probably have been above the tree covered ground so the
iron-age people would not have needed to clear the ground to create
pasture but would have been close enough to the forests to find wood for
building and fencing.
The abundance of water at the bottom of the waterfall and the stream flowing from it would create a strip of good pasture and arable land whilst the hillock would have been clear of floods, was protected from the prevailing north-westerly winds by the height of Cautley Crag and also afforded a wonderful view of the surrounding area, essential for the fort's security. Those Iron Age people knew a thing or two! The picture below is taken from the information board, but looking south, across the A683: this is the landscape over which those Iron Age people gazed from their hill fort |
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Above From the path to Cautley Spout, looking across the A683. Although the stream was probably lower than normal, the surrounding area was still quite damp with trickles of water criss-crossing the path. It was beautifully free from traffic noise most of the time and the countryside took on its own July song - numerous crickets, lambs calling to their mothers (and the mothers giving a pretty fed-up baa back), buzzing of high velocity flies and the sweet and scree of swallows and swifts. Apparently you can tell the ambient temperature by counting the crickets' chirps over 13 seconds and adding 40 http://www.ivyhall.district96.k12.il.us/4TH/KKHP/1insects/cricket.html - if I'd known this, I would have tested the theory. The car thermometer was in the 80s so those poor old crickets must have been chirping away at just over 3 times a second, or 200 chirps a minute! |
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On the way back to
the road I was able to get this picture of Cautley Beck - those white
objects in the water are mainly gulls - black capped gulls! I had to be quick, though,
because as soon as they were disturbed they flew away to the safety of the
field beyond, only to return when the walkers had passed by.
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| From Cautley Spout
we retired for lunch at Garsdale Head. On the approach to Garsdale there
is a lovely view of the Settle Carlisle Railway as it crosses the valley;
today there was a lot of activity with a diesel engine and numerous
yellow trucks stationary on the line and surrounded by workmen, diggers,
mechanical shovels and other equipment - we must have passed by on a day
when repairs and maintenance was carried out.
Lunch was booked at The Moorcock Inn. On possibly the hottest day of the year so far, the cool of the lounge was greatly appreciated by all of us and the lunches were declared to be extremely good - well cooked, tasty, more than enough to eat and well priced! Memo: must take the family there during the holidays. View their website on http://www.moorcockinn.com/ |
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Next stop was Hawes - what a
pretty place, with the modern building and improvements all designed to
match the older buildings. It is also England's highest market town at 850
ft above sea level http://www.stockdill.freeserve.co.uk/hawes/
We visited the shop at the Wensleydale Cheese Factory and we walked through the town to the ropemakers. The town's location makes it one of the few places where you can still buy all your groceries, hardware, etc., along with books and banking services, without having to drive to a larger town. Unfortunately the shops were closing for the day when we arrived - and we still had more places to visit - or a visit to Elijah Allen & Son would have been a necessity for me, the window display foretold an emporium of culinary delights! This picture shows the river Wensley running rather dry - as were a few of the rivers and brooks in the area that day. I was curious to know whether the buildings on the left had used the river for power at some time, whether they were old woollen mills, perhaps. Apparently the Dales Museum is devoted to farming, knitting lead-mining and other industries. As a knitwear designer and granddaughter of a family of lead miners I can see that a return visit is definitely on the cards. Below are two pictures taken in the town of Hawes |
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| The road from Hawes is a good 'B' road, but then we turned on to unclassified roads to make our way over to the small, but extremely picturesque, village of Dent. No matter where you travel in this area, the views are magnificent, varying from mile to mile, sometimes over the moors, sometimes steep inclines or declines, sometimes in the valley bottoms shaded by trees. This was a seriously hot day and most of the river beds were dry. As we got nearer to Dent the roads got narrower and there was a fair number of old hump-back bridges spanning the river; typically these bridges are almost at right angles to the roads and the scariest was definitely one where one of the walls had been demolished and, as you turned onto the bridge into the full sunglare, the only thing between the road and a steep fall into the river was some red warning tape. | |
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| The 17th century Sun Inn at Dent
was a welcome rest and we all enjoyed a leisurely drink in the garden at
the back of the pub, some of us choosing the shade of the large
tree.
Here, some of the group are enjoying a lecture about the advantages of a single-lens reflex digital camera, concentrating hard in case they had to answer questions later. We were entertained by swallows, swifts and jackdaws - the latter posing prettily on a gable end until they saw the SLR, then flying away with a "chak-chak-can't-catch-me"! These pictures were all taken with a Casio EX-Z50 which may not have SLR but stores an awful lot of pictures, fits into a docking station so it is always fully charged and is an absolute doddle to transfer the pictures! |
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Black capped gulls:I was going to call them seagulls, but Andrew had recognised them for what they were - black-capped gulls. Courtesy of the RSPB site at http://www.rspb.org.uk/birds/guide/b/blackheadedgull/index.asp I now know a little more about them. Definitely (says the RSPB) they are not seagulls, these are black-headed gulls which often breed inshore at lakes and moorland pools; they are sociable, form small flocks, can be quarrelsome and noisy. Their heads are not really black at all, in fact the colour varies from brown right down to white, their summer plummage! Well spotted, Andrew! |
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