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Reading the Rock Beneath Your Boots

The limestone pavements of the Yorkshire Dales were not built — they were uncovered. Around 350 million years ago, warm shallow seas laid down thick beds of Carboniferous limestone packed with the remains of crinoids, corals and brachiopods. Ice sheets later planed the tops flat, and meltwater scoured the natural joints into the blocky, shattered surface we know today. What you are walking on is a fossil seabed, quarried by glaciers and then left to the weather.

The Dales are unusually rich in it. Malham Lings above Malham Cove, Great Asby Scar near Orton, Scales Moor below Whernside, Newbiggin Crags, and the scattered pavements above Settle and Ingleton all offer good examples within a reasonable day's walk. None of them are at their best in the wet. Limestone that has just been rained on is greasy as a wet slate, and the flat clint tops hold a film of water that will catch you out on the descent. Save these walks for a dry spell, ideally after two or three clear days.

Before you set off, spend five minutes looking at a single bedding plane. You will see the joints running in two dominant directions, roughly at right angles, which is what creates the grid. Everything else follows from that pattern.

Walking on Clints and Grykes

The blocks are clints. The fissures between them are grykes. Learning to move across them properly is the whole skill of a limestone day, and it protects the rock as much as your ankles.

• Walk on the clint tops wherever you can. They are the strongest part of the surface and the least easily damaged.
• Never jam a boot into a gryke to bridge it. The edges of the clints are brittle and will snap off, and a wedged foot in a two-metre-deep slot is a genuine injury risk.
• Step down into grykes only when they are shallow, dry and clearly floored. Test the base with a pole before committing weight.
• Keep to the bedding edge rather than the grass verge. Plants clinging to the pavement rim are the first thing to die when boots start cutting corners.
• Avoid the obvious worn lines. Where everyone walks, the gryke walls get polished and the vegetation disappears.

Expect to travel at roughly half your normal pace. A kilometre of pavement can take an hour, and that is fine — it is not a surface to rush.

A Garden in the Cracks

Grykes are cool, humid and shaded, and they behave like a chain of tiny ravines. That microclimate shelters plants that would otherwise be grazed off or dried out, and it makes the pavement one of the richest botanical habitats in Britain.

Look for blue moor-grass, hart's tongue fern, lily-of-the-valley, wood anemone, dog's mercury, wild garlic and, in the deeper slots, baneberry. The rarer specialities — holly fern, limestone fern and angular Solomon's seal — are slow-growing and fragile. Many are legally protected, and none of them recover from a boot print. Photograph them, kneel beside them, but leave them exactly where they are, and keep dogs on the clint tops rather than letting them root about in the cracks.

Kit Worth Mending

Limestone is abrasive and it eats gear. The answer is not to buy more of it, but to buy things that can be brought back.

• Welted leather boots can be resoled two or three times before the uppers give up. A stitched sole unit is worth the extra cost on this kind of ground.
• Wool socks should be darned, not binned. A heel takes twenty minutes to repair and will then outlast the rest of the sock.
• Waxed cotton and heavy canvas can be re-proofed and patched indefinitely with a tin of wax and a needle.
• Soles matter more than tread. Polished limestone rewards a soft, sticky rubber compound; deep lugs are less useful here than they are on peat.

Carry a small repair kit as standard: a stout needle, waxed thread, spare laces and a couple of patches. Learning to darn, to stitch a strap back onto a pack and to re-set a rivet turns a broken walk into a five-minute stop.

Hillcraft for a Dry Day Out

Limestone country behaves differently from gritstone or peat, and a few habits will keep the day straightforward.

• Carry more water than the map suggests. Streams sink at swallow holes and dry valleys stay dry, sometimes for kilometres. Plan refills at known springs and villages.
• Treat shake holes and potholes with respect. They are open shafts in the ground, often hidden by grass, and there is no safe way to test one with a foot.
• Navigate by compass as well as features. A hectare of pavement in mist looks identical in every direction, and the grid of grykes offers no reliable line to follow.
• Watch for glare and heat. White rock bounces sun back at you, so a hat, sunglasses and sunscreen earn their place even on a cool spring day.
• Give nesting season some thought. Between March and July, keep to the main paths and keep dogs close.

The reward comes late in the day, when low light rakes across the clints and every gryke throws its own shadow. It is a slow landscape that asks for slow movement — and the walker who treads lightly, mends their kit and takes the time to read the rock will get far more out of it than the one who hurries across.