Malham and the Pennines

Abstract

Some of the highest summits in the backbone of England — the Pennines — occur in the Craven Uplands. The peaks of Whernside, Ingleborough and Penyghent, built of terraced layers of hard gritstone and softer shales, rear their table-like heads above the surrounding limestone moorlands and the intervening dales. These rocks weather to give poor soils and dark aprons of ‘scree’. They are often capped by a crown of dark brown peat, and they provide the gathering grounds for many streams which rise on their barren, windswept upper slopes and then plunge rapidly into great vertical shafts (such as Gaping Gill, site 7) once they cross onto the porous and permeable limestone.