AUGUST 2022 · ADVENTURE

Malham Cove

Malham Cove, Yorkshire Dales, England

The Cove announces itself. You come out of Malham village following the beck and the cliff appears at the dale's head — eighty metres of pale grey limestone, curving in a gentle arc that the geology textbooks call an amphitheatre. The word is accurate. From below it's genuinely theatrical. What's less theatrical is the limestone pavement on top, which is a flat expanse of fractured rock with ferns growing in the grikes — the vertical cracks between the clints, the flat-topped blocks. The ferns find their way into every gap. The drainage here all goes underground.

Close detail of limestone pavement with ferns and moss growing between cracks — The drainage all goes underground

— The Cove

The walk ranges wider than just the Cove. The moorland to the north and east is open country with dry stone walls cutting it into parcels of rough pasture. The walls are Dales walls — double-skinned, filled with rubble, mortarless, and they have been there longer than most things you can point at. Some of them mark the edges of fields that haven't been actively farmed in a generation. A ruined cottage sits in one of these — stone walls standing, roof gone, vegetation reclaiming the floor. The gnarled tree beside the nearby wall has been there long enough to have grown into whatever shape the wind dictated.

You can walk the moorland all day and it gives you the same composition from different angles.
Malham Cove — August 2022

The 80-metre limestone amphitheatre of Malham Cove rising above verdant valley floor — Eighty metres of pale grey limestone

— Above the Valley

Under moody light — which is to say most of August in the Dales — the moorland goes dark and the limestone pavement almost glows. A figure on a path with a dry stone wall behind them, the sky above grey-bottomed and moving: that's the image the dale keeps offering. You can walk the moorland all day and it gives you the same composition from different angles.

Ancient gnarled tree alongside dry stone wall dividing green pasture fields — Grown into whatever shape the wind dictated

Ruined stone structure on moorland hillside surrounded by grass and blue sky — Roof gone, vegetation reclaiming the floor

— Moody Light

The signpost in Malham village is carved stone, old. It points toward the Cove, toward the Tarn further up the dale. Both distances are given in fractions of a mile, which is either charming or unhelpful depending on how much you care about precision.

The pool on the moor has a limestone wall on one side and green hills on the other. It doesn't appear on most maps.