Ingleborough
10 miles/16km
EASTWARDS TO HAWES we go, then over the B6255 – another epic drive – that carries us to Ribblehead and Chapel-le-Dale.
We have an appointment with the Yorkshire Dales’ superstar mountain.
Ingleborough is magnetic. That nose, the flat top, the crags. It has three classic routes of approach but sadly it’s hard to link all of them in one walk. But by driving down Chapel-le-Dale, we can dose up on the classic silhouette view of Ingleborough, before scooching round to the village of Clapham. Because from here starts the best and most rewarding walk up the mountain, even if it doesn’t reveal that famous profile.
There’s so much to love about this route: the long, wooded approach up Clapdale Drive, the easy but thrilling scramble up Trow Gill, followed by a gawp into Gaping Gill, where Fell Beck plunges 322ft into the second largest cave chamber in Britain – a space large enough to hold York Minster.
Then the slow, gradual climb up the chubby shoulder of Ingleborough itself. And up top, the big reveal of that epic view, across Chapel-le-Dale to Ingleborough’s stately brother, Whernside.
Cross-shaped shelter, Iron Age hill fort, top-of-the-world feeling. Ingleborough.
I have perhaps missed you most of all.
The return leg follows a chunk of the Yorkshire Three Peaks route, down to the vast limestone
sprawl of Sulber (Pen-y-ghent on the horizon), then back to Clapham on Long Lane. I love Clapham; one of the very best places to sink into after a day on the hills, with the added wonderful irony of it not being a sprawling hipster enclave famed chiefly for its train station.
“Ingleborough magnetic. is
That nose, the flat top, the crags… by driving down Chapel-le-Dale, we can dose up on the classic silhouette view.”