Malham

A tropical sea, three hundred million years ago

The landscape at Malham is the most dramatic limestone scenery in England, and understanding it means going back around three hundred million years to the Carboniferous period.

Britain then sat close to the equator, submerged beneath a warm shallow sea. Marine organisms lived and died in that water, and their shells and skeletons settled on the seabed in vast quantities. Compressed over millions of years, that accumulation became limestone.

Everything you see at Malham is that ancient seabed, lifted, tilted and carved. The white cliffs, the pavements, the gorges and the caves are all the same rock, shaped by water and ice.

Janet's Foss and Gordale Scar

We leave Malham village through riverside meadows into a wooded gorge to Janet's Foss, a waterfall dropping into a clear pool over a curtain of tufa, a rock that forms as limestone-rich water evaporates. Local tradition says Janet, queen of the fairies, lived in a cave behind the falls.

A short walk on is Gordale Scar, a ravine around a hundred metres deep where waterfalls pour between overhanging cliffs. Whether it is a collapsed cavern or a channel carved by glacial meltwater depends on which geologist you ask, and we look at the evidence for both.

Malham Tarn and the vanishing river

Climbing out above Gordale, we cross open limestone country to Malham Tarn, a glacial lake held in place by a band of older, impermeable rock beneath the limestone. Stone Age hunters followed herds of animals here, and in 2016 the tarn became the site of the largest water vole reintroduction in the UK.

The stream that leaves the tarn does something remarkable. Within a few hundred metres it vanishes into the ground at Water Sinks. Dye tracing has shown that most of this water reappears at Aire Head, south of Malham village, up to a day later, while the stream you see at the foot of Malham Cove comes largely from elsewhere.

Malham Cove

From Water Sinks we follow the dry valley of Watlowes, carved by a river that no longer flows, to the top of Malham Cove. The Cove is a curved limestone amphitheatre around seventy metres high. At the end of the last Ice Age, with the ground frozen solid, meltwater poured over its lip in a waterfall that would have dwarfed Niagara. Water has not reached the top of the Cove in around two hundred years.

On top is one of the finest limestone pavements in Britain. The blocks are called clints and the fissures between them grikes, both formed by slightly acidic rainwater dissolving the rock along its natural joints. The grikes create sheltered, humid microclimates where woodland plants survive on open moorland.

You may recognise it. Harry and Hermione pitched their tent on this pavement in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One.

We finish by descending the steps beside the Cove to Malham Beck and back to the village.