The Yorkshire Dales National Park is the third largest in the UK and covers areas of karst limestone and gritstone moorland. Its beauty lies in the contrast between the bleak uplands and the fertile dales, but access problems and overuse put the landscape at risk.
Fabulous limestone scenery
In January 2021 the Yorkshire Dales was voted by users of the consumer website TripAdvisor as Europe’s favourite National Park. Such acclaim has to be taken with a pinch of salt; perhaps it was the success of a clever campaign by Yorkshire tourist attractions.
But the beauty and attractiveness of the Yorkshire Dales to visitors is undeniable. It covers 2,471 square kilometres of the Central Pennines and contains some of the finest carboniferous karst limestone scenery in Western Europe, with magnificent scars, crags and limestone pavements, typified by such nationally celebrated features as Malham Cove, Gordale Scar and Gaping Gill, one of the largest caverns and the highest waterfall in the British Isles.
In 2016 the Park was extended northward into what is about to become Westmorland and Furness, to cover the whole of the Howgills and Orton Fells, making the Dales the third largest of all the UK’s National Parks.
To the east lie areas of gritstone moorland, much of it heather covered, merging into the adjacent Nidderdale Area of Natural Beauty. Glaciation and river erosion, including the action of hundreds of waterfalls, have carved out these deep, winding valleys or dales. It is the contrast between the bleak uplands and dales – most but not all named after their rivers – with their scattered farms and stone barns, and complex patterns of drystone walls, that makes the dales so very special.
A landscape rich in human history and wildlife
The Yorkshire Dales are a cultural landscape reflecting three thousand years of human occupation and settlement, a Bronze and Iron Age landscape, interspersed with Roman roads, medieval settlements, Norman hunting forests and 18th-century parkland. But it is the small farms with their ancient herb-rich meadows that give the area a rare intimacy, a delicate balance between man and nature which lies at the root of the area’s appeal.
The Dales are also an important wildlife sanctuary, with over 100 species of birds being recorded, including several large raptors; over 1,000 species of moths; and 30 species of small mammals. The limestone uplands are also noted for wildflowers, with bird’s eye primrose, globe flower and purple saxifrage being among the more recognisable species.
An industrial past and iron roads
A contrasting element is an industrial landscape with early water-powered mills, and extensive remains of lead mining activity in Swaledale, Upper Wensleydale and Wharfedale. The impact of railways on the landscape is significant too, including England’s best-loved scenic railway, the Settle–Carlisle line, a magnificent feat of Victorian engineering typified by the iconic Ribblehead viaduct. The railway now provides perfect car-free access to some of the finest walking country in Britain.
With over 2,628km of public footpaths and 618km of bridleways and over half the land in the Park now public open access land where walkers enjoy the right to roam, the Yorkshire Dales are a walkers’ paradise.
Conservation, renovation and a move to ‘net zero’
The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, as well as strictly controlling building development, has taken the lead in action to not only conserve this special landscape but to seek new ways of managing the land to help mitigate the impacts of climate change and reduce emissions. Working with farmers and landowners to achieve ‘net zero’ carbon emissions, the Park has pioneered projects to increase the planting of trees, to manage soils and grassland to encourage wildflowers and wildlife, reducing over-grazing by sheep and introducing hardy breeds of cattle such as Belted Galloways.
A major innovation in the 1990s was the setting up of an independent charity, the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust. The Trust has used its charitable status to attract a wide range of funding from many sources including donations from its 20,000 supporters for vital conservation work. This has included planting well over a million trees, restoring ancient meadows and hundreds of historic barns and drystone walls. Equally important is its work with disadvantaged urban groups, including refugees, to provide educational visits to the Dales. It has also set up apprenticeship schemes to develop conservation skills.
The National Park is also a key player in the Yorkshire Peat Partnership, which works in the uplands of the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors and South Pennines, to protect and restore peat moorland. This moorland is a huge reservoir of stored carbon, carbon that can be released if the land is damaged by pollution or visitor pressure. But when restored, for example with new sphagnum planting, the land both absorbs carbon and slows down flows of water into the rivers that, after storms, can flood cities such as York and Leeds.
Visitor numbers and access remain a problem
But visitor pressures remain huge. In 2019, there were an estimated 4.7 million day-visitors and just over half a million staying visitors to the area. All these visitors help to support the local economy, but there is a downside. The Three Peaks Walk, a 24-mile tramp over the mountain summits of Pen y Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside, with over 1,500 metres of ascent, is a hugely popular challenge. Its frequent use and promotion by national charities has led to massive problems of erosion and congestion in Horton-in-Ribblesdale and at Ribblehead, despite the existence of a rail service.
With around three million people living within an hour’s travel time of the Park’s boundaries, many Dales villages such as Malham, Bolton Abbey, Grassington and Hawes now suffer from extreme traffic congestion, with huge overflow carparks at summer weekends blighting areas such as Malhamdale.
Arguments persist over transport management and bus provision
Transport is the Achilles’ heel of the National Park. The Authority has made only minimal effort to manage the traffic that floods into the National Park on fine weekends, suggesting that traffic management and transport provision are the responsibility of North Yorkshire County Council, who in turn suggest that visitor management is the responsibility of the National Park.
Despite tourism being North Yorkshire’s prime industry, incredibly, the council refuses to support any Sunday or Bank Holiday bus services as an alternative to the car. Yet recent research has shown that transport – largely private cars – is now the biggest source of carbon emission from the Yorkshire Dales.
It has been left to a voluntary group, The Friends of the Dales, to provide a part solution. In 2007, the Friends set up a subsidiary community interest company, known as the Dales & Bowland CIC, that now operate a network of 14 integrated Swiss-style weekend bus services marketed as DalesBus. Buses meet trains at stations, with through multi-operator and multi-modal ticketing. But in addition to managing and promoting this bus network, D&BCIC has to raise the cash to support the network.
North Yorkshire County Council refuses to help. Excellent support does come from the West Yorkshire Combined Authority because of its value to the health and wellbeing of West Yorkshire residents. However only a token amount of £5,000 (out of an annual budget of £6mn) comes from the National Park Authority. The rest of the £120,000 required to run the network comes from a combination of charitable grants and donations.
Most users of DalesBus do not have access to a car and therefore depend solely on the bus service. But every motorist who chooses the bus to access a magnificent range of linear walks also reduces their carbon footprint while so doing. With steeply rising costs there is no certainty that DalesBus can survive the financial cuts ahead. This would leave many people excluded from the National Park. And ever-increasing traffic pollution to undermine much of Park’s conservation aims.
