16 Dales photos here. Did you feel the season turning this week? Is the central heating back on? When September opens the door to let in autumn we all feel the draught. It did lead to some lovely evening light on Wednesday around my Langcliffe home in the Dales, and I was able to take the camera out for a stroll …
Back in the mid to late 1960s when I was a teenager I often visited Stainforth Foss at this time of year. We either stayed in The Hut or camped in the field where it is housed as we undertook the Duke of Edinburgh Award. ‘The Hut’ was the nickname WRCC’s Outdoor Education Centre set up in the early sixties which you can still see in a field above the Ribble. It looks a bit forlorn and underused nowadays but the Foss still draws in visitors. While I was there one evening this week a young family were staring at the falls waiting to see salmon leaping. Doing my best impression of that old country character from TV, Jack Hargreaves, I told them it was probably a little bit early for the fish to be jumping. Just then up popped a salmon. I skulked away embarrassed, still mumbling about it being early.
Of course I didn’t catch it on camera. I also struggled to snap one of the many rainbows created by the combination of water and evening sunshine. There was a dead lamb floating in the Ribble by the old packhorse bridge, perhaps caught out by the heavy rain we’d had earlier in the day – the river rises quickly here.
Train of thought
I was waiting for this steam train to arrive at Ribblehead. It was raining and the west wind was blowing strongly in this exposed part of the Dales. The tops of Whernside and Ingleborough were covered in cloud and there were few people about given the time of year. Even the hardy train buffs were absent. Bill Mitchell once described this area as having a ‘frontier feel’. In his book, Summat and Nowt, Bill tells of the time in the 1950s when ‘the station had a harmonium in the waiting room and a wind-vane on the roof – the station combined its railway role with that of a church and weather station’. In 1954, 109 inches of rain were recorded here.
There’s an easy pleasant walk of only a couple of miles I do which takes in the pretty little waterfall, above, of Wharfe Gill Sike (off the road between Austwick and Helwith Bridge). From there I follow the path through Wharfe. The hamlet has some lovely old Dales buildings and residents like this horse, which insisted on showing me its ‘best side’.
Dales tree petition
Campaigners trying to save the 150-year-old beech tree at North Ribblesdale RUFC in Settle are ramping up their objections against the tree’s planned execution. They have started a petition on the website 38 Degrees – join the campaign here http://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/think-again?bucket=email-blast-15_9_2017_settletree_cby_blast