Malham Tarn and Pen-y-ghent

Saturday 11th September 2004

This time of the year the weather is not really conducive towards walking which means that I run out of walks to describe on this blog. In the past I have mined the dim and distant past for walks that I did early in my career before I started this blog and often when doing that I have been able to use my diaries from that time to aide my memory of those walks. However on some of those early walking holidays I didn’t make any notes of my experiences at the time so it has been difficult to now translate those holidays onto this blog. One such holiday is the one that I took in the late summer of 2004 and once again I will have nothing to help me except my own feeble memory of all those years ago. It was held in the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines, and even stretched to end in the Lake District with a fabulous walk on the Kentmere Round, but it started in the Three Peaks area of the Yorkshire Dales. First thing in the morning I drove up, around Leeds, and to the tiny village of Arncliffe, in Littondale.

To start the walk I headed along the curiously named Monk’s Road, a path that climbs up the hillside above the valley of Cowside Beck into an area rich in limestone outcrops and stunning views. My memory of the weather on the walk is a little vague, but I’m not sure it was great and may even have had rather low cloud which would not have shown off the scenery to its best. Passing through the rich limestone countryside I passed through the Midge Hills and turned right at Middle House Farm to head down to the stunning Malham Tarn. Limestone absorbs water so lakes are a rare sight in the Yorkshire Dales, but Malham Tarn sits on a bed of Silurian slate creating one of the largest lakes in the area and is consequently one of its biggest tourist attractions. Since this holiday was my first in the Yorkshire Dales, this was the first time that I had ever been to Malham Tarn and fortunately I would see better weather on my subsequent visits.

Turning right at the shore of Malham Tarn onto the Pennine Way I followed this greatest of all long distance trails in Britain across the top of the Cowside Beck valley and up into the low cloud on Fountains Fell. I distinctly remember walking over this hill in misty conditions and since I had great weather for my walk along this section of the Pennine Way in 2009 then that must be from this walk. Despite the poor weather I was able to follow the route of the clear path over the vast flat-topped fell to the northern edge where a clear track takes a diagonal route down the hillside where, on a clear day, stunning, and tantalising, views can be seen across the valley of the distinctively shaped Pen-y-ghent. Following the route of the Pennine Way I came down to a road and after a short distance left the road to come round to the southern tip of Pen-y-ghent where a sporting scramble up the steep hill led me satisfactorily to the windswept summit of this iconic hill, the smallest, but most beloved of the Three Peaks.

I can’t imagine that the weather was particularly good on this exposed summit so I’m sure I must not have lingered, but soon headed beside the wall that runs along the length of this elongated hill. Pen-y-ghent is the highest point of this hill and lies at the southern end of an upland mass that broadens out after crossing a saddle to the much wider Plover Hill. This wall was my guide along the top of the otherwise featureless hill and lead me down to the boggy col and up the gradual climb until eventually I reached the summit of Plover Hill. Although I have since been back to Pen-y-ghent, in 2009 while walking the Pennine Way, I have not been back to Plover Hill, and I’m guessing most people also don’t go across to Pen-y-ghent’s twin simply because it is slightly smaller, but also because it is, in fairness, less appealing in appearance. Coming off from the summit I headed north down the grassy slopes out of clouds and onto Foxup Road, which is a track that took me down to the bottom of the valley at Foxup.

I was now in the upper reaches of Littondale and to conclude this walk all I had to do was follow the valley bottom path all the way back to my car in Arncliffe. This was not a short walk and took me several hours during which time the weather finally decided to let go as it started raining so that by the time I reached my car I was quite wet and quite late. I think I didn’t get to my car until after six o’clock and I still needed to get to the youth hostel where I had pre-booked an evening meal for seven o’clock. As the crow flies the hostel was not far away as I was staying at the now closed Stainforth Youth Hostel, but the roads in between are very narrow and feature lots of steep gradients. I eventually reached the hostel just before seven and only just in time for dinner. Ever since then I have tried to avoid pre-booking dinner at hostels just in case I’m delayed on my walk. The weather was not kind to me on this walk, which is a shame as I’m sure my memories of it would have been a lot warmer if the weather had been likewise.