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.

Malham Cove

The Cove is a curved limestone amphitheatre nearly eighty metres high, and it stops people in their tracks. It sits on the line of the Middle Craven Fault, a geological fracture that displaced the rock and created the step in the landscape.

At the 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, a genuinely unusual ecology.

Water above and below

Malham is a landscape defined by water that keeps disappearing. Limestone is soluble and heavily jointed, so surface streams sink underground and reappear elsewhere, sometimes miles away. Dye tracing experiments have shown that the water emerging at the foot of the Cove is not the water that sinks above it.

Janet's Foss, a waterfall dropping into a clear pool in a wooded gorge, takes its name from a local tradition that a fairy queen lived in a cave behind the falls. Gordale Scar, a short walk away, is a vast ravine where waterfalls fall down sheer cliff faces, either a collapsed cavern or a meltwater channel depending on which geologist you ask.

What you will see

We walk from Malham village through meadows to Janet's Foss, on toward Gordale Scar, and up to the top of Malham Cove and its limestone pavement. We cover the geology in detail, the ecology of the grikes, the water systems beneath your feet, and the folklore that attached itself to a landscape people found genuinely strange.