The Settle Town and Country Walk

The U3A, The Royal Geographic Society and The Institute of British Geographers joined forces in 2013 to showcase the landscape and history of Settle and its surrounding countryside by producing a booklet describing a walking route with comment on what was to be seen. The walk was designed by Tony Stephens and submitted as an entry to a competition. (The booklet is on sale in the Folly, the TIC and Settle Station). An introductory illustrated talk was given by Tony Stephens in the Quaker Meeting House in Settle in the morning, and the guided walk led by NCHT members followed in the afternoon. The talk was well-attended by about 50 people, local residents and visitors. Similarly the walk was well-supported by about 20 RGS and NCHT members and others.

The six-mile walk started in Settle Market Square and went via Banks Lane towards Langcliffe via the path on the hillside and on toVictoria Cave. Points of interest were the 1757 Settle Enclosure Act straight walls climbing the hillsides, medieval manorial boundary walls, Settle Bridge seen from a distance, the three peaks and Winskill. Beyond Victoria Cave we looked at the Neolithic cup markings on a rock near the Langcliffe/Settle parish boundary, then descended from the limestone to the gritstone boggy land of Attermire below the scar. We looked at the medieval wall bounding Attermire with its orthostat boulders and noted Attermire and Horseshoe Caves in the uplifted Mid-Craven Fault scar above. Stockdale Lane was followed over the limestone reef knoll of High Hill and the walk continued down Lambert Lane to Preston’s Barn on the boundary of medieval Newfield. Just past the barn is a cattle underpass at the point where a path leads towards Settle. The boundary wall of Newfield has examples of two different types of wall construction - the early type with large basal boulders and the 19th-century type with regular courses of throughstones protruding slightly from the wall, as if to prove that they were actually present. At the western end of Newfield field, very large clearance boulders have been used to make the wall and soil on the uphill side has slowly migrated down the hillside to render levels very different on the two sides - evidence of considerable age. A view over the low Townfields reveals the presence of agricultural terraces or lynchets which are probably of Anglo-Saxon origin. The walk concluded with inspection of some of the old houses in Settle - Castleberg House on Victoria St, the Folly, Liverpool House on Chapel Square associated with the proposed canal scheme of 1773, John Birkbeck’s warehouse on Cheapside (now a sports shop), Sutcliffe House at the corner of Cheapside built by the apothecary Abraham Sutcliffe in the early 1700s, Bishopdale Court where John Wildman had his grocer’s shop, and the Naked Man café in the Market Square.

The walk can be done comfortably in four hours of walking - a steady climb of 400m is involved up to Victoria Cave and hill-walking clothing and footwear are needed. Further self-guided walks of this type can be found at www.discoveringbritain.org.