The Land of the Lune - Drakkar Press

48 Chapter 3: Western Howgills and Firbank Fell
The Yorkshire Dales National Park occupies some
1760 sq km and is the third largest of Britain’s fourteen
National Parks. The part we encounter in the Howgills is
uncharacteristic of the Dales, which are normally pictured
in terms of spectacular limestone scenery. The Yorkshire
Dales are no longer all in Yorkshire: the Howgills,
Dentdale and Garsdale are in Cumbria. (Some diehards,
usually Yorkshiremen, consider that the 1974 boundaries
defined new administrative regions and had nothing to do
with the traditional counties. The fact that the new regions
were also called counties and that many of them used old
county names was unfortunate but irrelevant. On that basis,
the southern Howgills, Dentdale and Garsdale continue to
be in (the traditional county of) Yorkshire and are also in
(the new administrative region of) Cumbria.)
As we will see, only a few of the Dales lie within Loyne
– Dentdale, Garsdale, Kingsdale and Chapel-le-Dale. The
Lune is the western border for 12km and Lunesdale is not
sensibly regarded as one of the Yorkshire Dales.
Like all British National Parks, the Yorkshire Dales
National Park is not state-owned but consists of privately
owned estates and farms administered by an authority
responsible for conservation and recreation. It is therefore
both a tourist attraction and a working area, which even
includes some large quarries.
Carlingill Beck
Carlingill Beck and the River Lune mark the
northwestern boundary of the Yorkshire Dales
National Park. Today this seems anomalous. A boundary
has to be somewhere but there seems no discernible
reason for it to include the southern part of the Howgills
but to exclude the northern part, as they are the same
in terms of geology and scenery. The boundary is here
simply because the old Westmorland-Yorkshire county
border lay along Carlingill Beck at the time the National
Park was established in 1954.
Carlingill Beck is an excellent site for students of
fluvial geomorphology (that is, of how flowing water
affects the land), providing some good illustrations of
post-glacial erosion. The beck arises as Great Ulgill
Beck below Wind Scarth and Breaks Head, on a
ridge that runs from The Calf, and then curves west at
Blakethwaite Bottom, a sheltered upland meadow below
Uldale Head. It enters an increasingly narrow gorge,
with contorted rock formations exposed on the southern
side, giving us our first real view of the Silurian slate
of the Howgills. The beck then forms The Spout, which
is as much a water shoot as a waterfall, as it tumbles
steeply over 10m of tilted rocks. To the north are
steep screes and further exposed contorted rocks
and below to the south looms the deep, dark gash
formed by Little Ulgill Beck.
Here is Black Force, the most spectacular
scene of the Howgills: not one force but a series
of cascades, deep within a V-shaped ravine that
has remarkable rock formations exposed on its
western side. Our journey through the northern
Howgills showed us little to hint at the striking
degree of erosion hidden within this gill.
Beyond admiring the awesome sights, we
might wonder about causes and effects. The
benign, smooth slopes of the Howgills do not
suggest the convulsions needed to form the
contorted rocks seen by Carlingill Beck. Are
these contortions limited to Carlingill Beck, or
Left: Upper Carlingill Beck, with The Spout
middle right.
Right: Black Force (the scale may be judged
by the two walkers and a dog on the path
top right - you can’t see them? - precisely).
This is Chapter 3 of The Land of the Lune (2nd edition), http://www.drakkar.co.uk/landofthelune.html, Copyright © 2010 John Self