Читать книгу Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: South and West. Wharfedale, Littondale, Malhamdale, Dentdale and Ribblesdale онлайн

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The legacy of the ice can be traced throughout the Dales in characteristic rounded hills, straight U-shaped valleys and the dramatic cliffs of truncated spurs. The moving ice carried boulders far from their origins and moulded underlying clay into distinctive egg-shaped hills called drumlins. With the thaw, the unstable sides of overly steep valleys slumped in landslide, and layers of boulder clay were dumped along the base of valleys allowing surface rivers to flow over limestone. Some dales were dammed with terminal moraines that held back lakes, but all but two of these – Malham Tarn and Semer Water – have subsequently silted up or drained away. The deluge of meltwater cut spectacularly narrow ravines through the rock and created majestic waterfalls. Some of these still carry water today – although mere trickles by comparison with the former torrents of their creation – and are well worth looking out for.

Human settlement

Homo sapiens appeared in Europe some 40,000 years ago and, during the warm interludes between glaciation, wandered into Britain. But with each ice age driving them back south and wiping the archaeological slate almost clean, those early incursions of people and the beasts which they followed for food have left few traces. Stone Age peoples eventually returned to the Dales around 9000 years ago, small bands of hunter-gatherers eking a nomadic existence in a steadily warming climate. Although artefacts are thin on the ground, they left their mark by beginning the clearance of primeval woodland, a process which gathered momentum with the later development of agriculture and the transition to a more settled lifestyle. The many caves and crevices in the limestone hills served as shelters for living and burial, a fact which perhaps explains the relative absence here of the constructed internment chambers, cairns and henges found elsewhere in the country. By the time of the Bronze Age, large areas had been cleared for grazing and agriculture, but a deterioration in climate led to the spread of extensive blanket bog across the upper plateaus.