Photos of the Yorkshire Dales Paul Jackson Ribblesdale
By the time I’d taken this photo those two Jaffa cakes had melted. The cuppa was welcome though here at Ottiwell Lodge, Snaizeholme, near Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales. I’d come to see how the population of wild red squirrels were doing. I spotted a few of the cuties but the little beggars weren’t in the mood for posing for the camera and I certainly wasn’t quick enough to capture them in focus! The scenery of course was wonderful and the temperature in the wood very pleasant.
Driving through Swaledale this morning I doubted there was a better place I could possibly be. I travelled up Ribblesdale, in amongst the Three Peaks, before heading over Buttertubs Pass and negotiating my way around sheep that had serious suicidal tendencies (they were sunbathing in the middle of the road). Almost got run over myself while taking some photos of the meadows near Gunnerside (shame the Kings pub has now closed). Then, in sharp contrast to the neatly walled enclosures of the dale, it was over the wild open heather moorland to Redmire in Wensleydale and back home via Bolton Castle and Hawes. Yorkshire writer Alfred J Brown (1894-1969) once wrote: ‘One of the charms of the Yorkshire Dales is that they are all characteristically different, like lovely sisters of the same family.’ Nicely put.