Читать книгу The Ribble Way. A Northern England Trail онлайн

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There is still hope, too, that the landowners at Sawley may have a change of heart and once more admit walkers to a splendid section of the river. No doubt other changes will occur over the course of time, for like the river itself, nothing is constant.

LANDSCAPE

Despite the river’s relatively short length (75 miles/171km), it travels through a great diversity of landscape. The bleakness of the slate, grit and limestone hills that surround its source at Ribblehead is in sharp contrast to the richly green alluvial plains that fringe the watercourse amid the rounded slopes of central Lancashire, and the vast reclaimed marsh through which the river escapes to the sea gives no hint of the lush, wooded banks to be found further upstream. Although for much of its way the river squirms vigorously within the confines of a broad valley, its general course is relatively uncomplicated. After initially aligning almost with the meridian to break from the hills at Settle, later it is gently turned onto a westerly trend, in search of the open sea, by the outliers of the Pennine Moors. But today’s river is a mere shadow of the mighty torrent of meltwater that originally gouged out the valley. This meltwater was released as vast ice sheets began to retreat in the face of a warming climate, barely 12,000 years ago.