Qualla: Yorkshire Dales National Park

Yorkshire Dales National Park: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cyberdemon007 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. Lift your eyes off the road climbing out of Hawes at dusk and the sky does something English skies rarely do anymore. It goes properly dark. In 2020 the Yorkshire Dales National Park was designated an International Dark Sky Reserve, which sounds like bureaucratic poetry until you actually stand on Buttertubs Pass at midnight and see the Milky Way smeared overhead. Light pollution stops at the park boundary, more or less. What replaces it is something older: dry-stone walls under starlight, sheep moving like grey shadows, and the silhouettes of the Three Peaks against the horizon.

Image: Cyberdemon007 at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Yorkshire Dales National Park: What the Map Calls a Park

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Derek Parkinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Yorkshire Dales National Park covers 2,178 square kilometres of upland England, designated in 1954 and significantly extended westward in 2016. Most of the park sits in North Yorkshire, with a sizeable chunk in Cumbria and a small tail in Lancashire. The 2016 expansion pushed...

Image: Derek Parkinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Yorkshire Dales National Park: Stepped Hills, Hidden Rivers

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, Public domain. Underneath everything is Carboniferous Limestone, laid down in shallow tropical seas around 340 million years ago. The rock weathers in distinctive horizontal bands, giving the dales their characteristic stepped silhouette as harder limestone alternates with softer shales of the ...

Image: Immanuel Giel | Public domain

Yorkshire Dales National Park: Walls That Crossed Centuries

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. A 1988 survey estimated 8,000 kilometres of dry-stone walling inside the Yorkshire Dales. That is roughly the distance from London to Karachi, laid stone by stone, mostly by hand, mostly without mortar. Many walls date from the parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and ninet...

Image: Public domain

Yorkshire Dales National Park: Herriot Country

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kreuzschnabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long-distance walkers know the park as the spine of the Pennine Way, which crosses it north to south, joined by the Dales Way, the Coast to Coast Walk, and the Pennine Bridleway. The Settle-Carlisle railway threads through the western edge across the dramatic Ribblehead Viaduct, ...

Image: Kreuzschnabel | CC BY-SA 3.0