Walk around the Ingleborough Waterfalls

Leader J.M. Hughes

We assembled in the Waterfalls car park, for a walk around the nearly 5-mile circuit, with a 500 million year geological slant. We started on the present-day surface lying directly over Coal Measures of about 320 million years ago, although there was nothing spectacular to see amidst the greenery and the metalled surface of the car park apart from the sadly-damaged stone viaduct which used to carry the mineral railway siding. Shortly into the walk, we came to outcrops of limestone which the mineral railway had been built to exploit, both in the raw state and processed into quicklime in the Hoffman lime kiln situated a short distance away on the far bank between the two tributaries of the Greta.

Carrying on beside the River Doe (not the Twiss, which despite the Ordnance Survey is actually the eastern branch) we passed the coin-encrusted arched trunk of a fallen tree, crossed the river and came in sight of the towering faces of the old Pecca Quarry. The path crossed back to the West bank and went past the entrance to the quarry.

Then we came to Thornton Force, and the remarkable sight of the stream cascading over a shelf of horizontally-bedded rocks, to land on the edges of rocks standing vertically. A not-too-difficult scramble took some members underneath the waterfall, to see at close quarters the actual junction (known as an unconformity) between the two rock formations. Shortly afterwards the path crossed again to the eastern bank, and we reached the old trackway between Kingsdale and Twistleton, where the ice-cream caravan provided welcome refreshment. On through Beezley's Farm to the River Twiss which descends through a series of gorges in the vertically-bedded Ingletonian rock. We descended to the stream, and then it was up and down and up and down, over to the eastern bank, and past a series of disused quarries with the area of the present-day working quarry fenced off high above. In the Spring this area is a mass of bluebells.

The track emerged from the wood quite high above the river, and on the far side massive beds of limestone appeared dipping steeply downhill. We were looking at the quarry faces left behind after masses of rock had been quarried away. The remains of the Hoffman kiln could just be picked out amongst the vegetation below the cliffs.

Numerous geological students were also to be seen, scrambling here and there and along the bed of the river, where no doubt they obtained a more intimate impression of the geology of this part of the walk that we could hope for from the comfort of the footpath above. The path led on into Ingleton.             J H