OS Explorer map OL2, Yorkshire Dales – Southern & Western Area: Whernside, Ingleborough & Pen-y-ghent – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 21st September 2022.
Google Maps location links: Ribblehead, Embsay, Gargrave
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, travelling around Britain by train, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 5 of the trip – for a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead. The Previous Visits section will be new, though.
After my relatively laid-back day in and around Manchester, the next morning I was ready to launch fully back into my trip, and had exciting plans: this day I’d be travelling the length of the Settle-Carlisle line, which is always right up there on lists of the most scenic British railway lines, plus I planned on a couple of stops for exploring or walks. Despite never having ridden the line before, I have written about it on the blog before, in my Kirkby Stephen post, when I at least saw the line – I therefore won’t repeat the little that I wrote about its history and quirks, so have a look there if you want to see that!
My day started with a train from Manchester Victoria out to Leeds, where I got on an 0920 train heading for the Settle-Carlisle. The scenery is nice from very early in the journey, and just gets better and better as the the train works its way past Keighley, Skipton and into the Yorkshire Dales.
For my first stop of the day, I got off at Ribblehead, in this map area and a couple of stops after Settle. The stations on the line are all very cute, in the same close architectural style, and Ribblehead was no exception. Like many of the stations, Ribblehead is rather in the middle of nowhere, the route having been chosen for fast end-to-end journey times, serving the settlements on the route as an afterthought with stations often rather distant from them.
In Ribblehead’s case, there’s nothing around but hills, the Station Inn pub, and of course the famous Ribblehead Viaduct just slightly down the line, which I, and most everyone else in the area, had come to see! I therefore headed out of the station, dumped my bag in a patch of tall nettles, and walked the ten minutes or so out past the pub to the viaduct.
The viaduct did not disappoint! It’s in a beautiful wide valley, and any photo that gets the whole of it in can’t adequately convey the vertical scale, which is equally impressive when you’re standing under it – the thing’s huge!
I had a short wander around near the viaduct, but didn’t stray too far as I wanted to catch the next train on northwards. I’d looked up the train time that morning, and knew it was roughly an hour and a half after I’d arrived – the timetable is a little strange, somewhere between hourly and two-hourly with a lot of odd gaps between trains – but hadn’t thought to note down the time, and since I was without phone signal on my walk, couldn’t look it up, so I headed back to the station early, and had a while to appreciate the information boards dotted around the little café and shop.
My train soon arrived and took me off further northwards. Passing the sumit of the line and some more great scenery, I got off a couple of stops further on at Garsdale, for a more substantial walk – however that was outside this map area, so I’ll leave it here! (For continued details, see my post about day 5 of the All Line Rover trip.)
Previous visits
Though this map area contains many of the most notable scenic and hilly parts of Yorkshire Dales, and I’d definitely like to come back for some more exploring in the hills, I’ve actually only been once before. That was in March 2016, when, for my 21st birthday, I came on a trip to a rented house in the area with a group of friends. I… can’t quite bring myself to write about most of that trip or post photos from the house because it was, frankly, a little embarrasingly fancy; rather ridiculous for something a 21-year-old had paid for by their parents. Therefore, I’ll just leave you with photos of a couple of things we did away from the house instead!
A few of us went on a trip to the Embsay and Bolton Abbey steam railway, taking it, as you might expect, from Embsay, out to explore the ruined Bolton Abbey a few miles away.
One day, we attempted to visit Malham Cove, but had to abandon it because it was too busy to find parking anywhere nearby, and instead ended up pottering around the nearby village of Gargrave, which had a fun set of stepping stones across the River Aire.
Visiting all the maps! 