THE THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF MISSING YORKSHIRE DALE

Stealth your way into a secret valley that hardly anyone knows about – and discover the remarkable story behind it…

THE FIRST TIME I discovered the truth about Upper Nidderdale, I thought someone was going to shoot me.

I’d driven as far up the picturesque valley of Nidderdale as I thought possible, to the village of Lofthouse. The public road goes no further up the valley; all you can do is detour up to the sweetly perched hamlet of Middlesmoor, or follow the road out of Nidderdale and over the moors to Masham. And then I found the secret road. Unmarked, unsigned, untraceable on Google Streetview; the entrance looks like it just leads into an industrial compound. In truth, it’s a private road to the upper stretch of the valley that’s hidden beyond Lofthouse.

As I took a deep breath and drove up it, I had visions of alarms going off in a darkened room, and automatic robo-cannons rising from the rocks to target my trespassing Astra. It didn’t happen. As it turns out, the owners of the road don’t mind you driving along it; they just don’t advertise the fact that you can. And although a dead end, it leads to one of the finest wilderness scenes in the Yorkshire Dales. And sometimes a tiny café. The secret world of Upper Nidderdale.

But let’s backtrack a bit, and sort out the geography. Nidderdale lies at the south-east edge of the Yorkshire Dales. It looks like a Yorkshire Dale, it feels like a Yorkshire Dale, it is surrounded by Yorkshire Dales. But it is not in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, having to content itself with the later recognition of AONB (or Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). Its exclusion seems baffling. There’s a reason behind it, but we’ll get to that.

There are a lot of well-known attractions in the main sweep of the dale. Its one town, Pateley Bridge, is rich in heritage; it even possesses The Oldest Sweet Shop in England. (The name is overly modest, because as of 2014 the Guinness Book of Records recognises this tiny emporium as the WORLD’S oldest continually-trading sweet shop.) The dale also has much-loved attractions such as Brimham Rocks, Stump Cross Caverns and How Stean Gorge.

But Upper Nidderdale is a different beast: a six-mile, gracefully curving valley, scythed by the wooded gorge of the upper Nidd, and veering round into the vast bowl of silent wilderness which houses the reason (or more accurately,

two reasons) why Nidderdale is not in the national park. With no village and no public road, it has to be one of the least-visited sectors of the Dales. And that’s why I love it.

The best way to get your first taste of Upper Nidderdale is to see it from afar. The valley to the west is the far more frequented Wharfedale, and if you set off out of cute little Kettlewell and climb the flanks of Great Whernside, which forms the border between the two, you’re on your way to rumbling the big secret.

Great Whernside itself is fascinating. It is not the same Whernside that forms part of the Yorkshire Three Peaks; that’s much further west. And despite the name, Great Whernside is 100ft lower than that Whernside. The ‘Great’ is there to distinguish this one from its neighbour Little Whernside, although that possibly just adds to the confusion.

Great Whernside is a fine, stout mountain in its own right, if a little bulky and shapeless.

Its summit is far more interesting than most Yorkshire Dales summits though, including its more famous namesake. Instead of a wide, featureless plateau, Great Whernside’s topknot is a jumbled sprawl of giant boulders, clustered around a trig point and an impressive cairn. It looks more like a Lakeland summit than a Dales one.

But the important thing is to look to the east, for there you’ll get your first view of the wild lands at the head of Upper Nidderdale. Immense and empty, with barely any sign of human presence (apart from two sheens of water), it very much has the feeling of a lost land. The mystery is compounded by the fact there’s no easy way to get down into it from here; not without ending up vastly further away from your start point than is helpful, anyway.

But you should definitely take a little detour and descend a short distance into the wide coombe at the north-eastern edge of Great Whernside’s summit ridge, and seek out a small trickle emerging from the peaty ground. This is Nidd Head Spring, the birthplace of the River Nidd. From here the trickle will descend into that wild bowl to the east. Then it will forge the valley that bears its name, before surging onwards to join the Ouse, which in turn joins the Humber, which in turn joins the North Sea.

So, you’ve beheld the secret valley, and on a marvellous walk in its own right. And as you turn west and descend back to snug, cosy Wharfedale, you’ll be thirsting to walk into that wild bowl the next day. And so you should.

“Look to the east, for there you’ll get your first view of the wild lands at Nidderdale.” the head of Upper

The Way Upstream

So, to Lofthouse, and the mystery beyond.

You could of course drive up the secret road, but that’s not the name of the game here. Instead there’s a footpath, part of the marvellous Nidderdale Way, which runs parallel to the road on the opposite side of the river. This will convey you into the narrow wooded gorge that leads to Upper Nidderdale, with the river for company all the way.

There’s a magic to following a river upstream, especially when you’re trying to solve a mystery. You feel the thrill that lured explorers to seek the source of the Amazon, or the trepidation felt by Martin Sheen heading upriver in search of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

This river, though, plays hide and seek with you. Through most of the year, and especially in the warmer months, the Nidd is often nothing more than a dry riverbed. The porous limestone draws the flow underground, to re-emerge much further downstream. If you do see actual water, it means there’s been a lot of rain. When that happens, the above-ground riverbed acts as an overflow channel, because the vast network of caves underfoot has flooded.

Above Manchester Hole (where the Nidd usually disappears into the ground), the valley takes a massive, right-angled jink to the left. At this point

the footpath climbs higher up the moorside, which means that as the great bowl of Upper Nidderdale finally opens up ahead, you’re at a magnificent vantage point to see it happen.

And there it is. The vast, wild amphitheatre you glimpsed yesterday from way up on Great Whernside, which now appears way ahead in the distance. The lost Yorkshire Dale, all yours.

Lying in wait ahead are the two sheens of water you also spotted yesterday. The nearer of the two, hemmed in by an immense dam, is Scar House Reservoir. Beyond it, even more distant and remote, is Angram.

They’re bleak and weird, and they’re also the reasons why absolutely none of Nidderdale is in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. They pre-date the park, having come onstream in 1913 (Angram) and 1936 (Scar House), so they were already a fixture of the landscape when the boundary was being drawn up in 1954. Their job is to provide water to the city of Bradford, 25 miles away. Every day they send around 100 million litres of water down the subterranean Nidd Aqueduct to the city. The entire journey is conducted without pumping, using gravity only.

And somehow, back in ’54, the water authority persuaded the government that the presence of the reservoirs should keep the dale out of the national park. Its executives feared that national park status would vastly increase visitor numbers; they much preferred to keep their reservoirs as free from public disruption as possible. They also worried (rightly) that the stringent restrictions placed on the industrial usage of national parks would hamper any attempt to expand the reservoirs in the future.

Was it a good decision? It’s a tough call. On the one hand, this feels every inch like a Yorkshire Dales landscape, so it seems absurd that it’s not part of the package. On the other, here I am, writing a story about a valley that is far wilder and less visited than any other part of the Dales – and that decision is the reason why. I quite like that there’s a secret outcast Yorkshire Dale, and that you can often get it to yourself.

And happily, today’s water authority – Yorkshire Water – adopts a far more inclusive attitude to visitors. Once you get to the far side of the Scar House dam, you’ll find a picnic area at the head of the secret road, bedecked with information boards telling you about the history of the reservoirs, and pointing out the walking options around the valley. There’s sometimes a seasonal café here too, run by the owners of How Stean Gorge.

The construction story is absorbing: one farming hamlet (Haden Carr) was flooded to create Scar House; a higher one (Lodge) was abandoned after

“I

quite like that there’s a secret outcast Yorkshire Dale, and that you can often get it to yourself.”

VALE OF SECRECY No town, no village, and only one secret road: there’s a real lost world feeling about walking into Upper Nidderdale.

 A GREAT DAY OUT The summit of Great Whernside looks more like a Lakeland top than a Dales one (even when you can’t see the view!)

▲ HERE COMES THE RIVER The source of the River Nidd, high up on Great Whernside, with the wild bowl of Upper Nidderdale and its two reservoirs in the distance.

▲ FLORAL PATH Foxgloves line the path out of Lofthouse in the summer, and you’ll see plenty of wildflowers in the meadows all about.

▲ DRY SPELL Exploring the stony bed of the River Nidd on an average dry day, when the river has made like The Jam and gone underground.

 A QUIET AND PERFECT PLACE Top left: The churchyard of St Chad’s in the tiny hamlet of Middlesmoor, with its rapturous view down Nidderdale.