Melbecks Moor
8¾ miles/14km
IT’S A SHORT jaunt down the broad grin of Swaledale to Feetham for this one: a walk into the industrial history of the Yorkshire Dales. Melbecks Moor was ground zero for Swaledale’s lead mining industry from Roman times through to the 19th century. The process has transformed the upper plateau into a peculiar moonscape of soft, bouncy shales, littered by pits and abandoned stone crushers. Hardly less impressive are the ruins of the Old Gang Smelting Mills, encountered on the walk up from Feetham: skeletal buildings where men of Swaledale laboured to pull lead from peat.
You can even see the line of the flue, a tented tunnel which
carried the acrid smoke and heat away from the mills, running up the side of Healaugh Side on Reeth High Moor.
Every other point on the map up here is a ‘hush’ – North Rake Hush, Bunton Hush, Friarfold Hush. It was the process of hushing that made that weird lunar landscape: it involved sloshing torrents of water over the topsoil, rinsing away the outer flesh of the moor to reveal the precious lead veins underneath. We can all be quite glad it doesn’t happen now, but it’s wonderful to lollop across this strange surface and soak up a unique manipulated landscape, frozen somewhere in the late 19th century, its junk literally left where it stood.
The descent, via Winterings Edge above Gunnerside Beck, is the Dales on a plate: rough moorland atop broad, stone-walled pastures; the curlew above and the sweet bleat of Swaledales below. We started in the newest and weirdest corner of the Dales. But right now, there’s no mistaking where we are.