13. Settle, North Yorkshire.

Details:- This is a walk from the Walking World website, for which I pay to subscribe. There are some excellent walks on the site, which are well presented, and generally easy to follow. My only gripe is that they are mostly less than ten miles long, and I would like to see some longer walks provided. This was one of their longer ones. Distance:- 12 miles. Going:- Well....the information said there was a height gain for the walk of 700 metres, but since nowhere on the walk is higher than 650 odd metres I find this hard to fathom. I should have thought it was a height gain of 150 metres or so. Progress:- walked 154 - 346 to go.

Photographs Hyperlink.

The Yorkshire Dales....

Wow! Wonderful walking country. I texted Jack who did Malham on his Duke Of Edinburgh Silver expedition. All he could remember was constantly treading in the droppings of the countless numbers of sheep up there. Hmmm - he probably slept well anyway.

Bomber.

My peace and quiet was shattered when this RAF bomber ripped the overhead sky apart as the pilot practised some (very) low level flying across the Dales. The noise level was enormous as it flew off into the distance; it's powerful engines roaring out loudly across most of the county.

Malham Tarn.

So here you are walking on all this porous limestone pavement with a myriad of pot holes beneath your feet. So how come there's this large freshwater pond holding up from beneath? Why doesn't the water permeate down through the limestone and form tights or mites or whatever it does down there? My rudimentary knowledge of geology affords me no clues. Any offers?

A drunken dry stone wall....

.....receding distantly towards Penyghent. We're in Ribblesdale here, There are plans to barrage the river at Penwortham, near Preston - as they have in Cardiff - for the purpose of redevelopment. I hope they don't. Gerard Manly Hopkins, the Jesuit who taught at my old school Stonyhurst, (which stands close to the Ribble near Ribchester), puts it well:- "What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, oh let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

A Cheese Scone/Yorkshire Pud Debate.

I do like a cup of tea and a scone, preferably cheese, after a walk. But in the Naked Man Tea Shop in Settle I saw natives tucking into Yorkshire puddings filled with gravy - at tea time no less. I have to say I'm not tempted. Indeed I wonder at all the fuss about puddings from Yorkshire; and at their elevated position as exemplary of our national cuisine. Surely tea is the quintessential english past-time, and a good scone is at the centre of a good tea-time. At the risk of upsetting the natives of 'god's own county' - about which I don't suppose I'll lose too much sleep - give me a cheese scone any day of the week! Anyone anxious to differ?