I lived on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales for nearly twenty years. Despite this, I’d never taken any photographs of Gordale Scar, one of the Yorkshire Dales National Park’s pre-eminent tourist attractions and natural wonders. A tremendous cleft in the limestone edge, with a river pouring through it and a rock climber’s playground to either side. I thought it was time I got some shots, so here there are.
You can fairly easily do a through-route right up through the gorge. In the pictures, you can see a bulbous piece of rock with a large hole in it, between the two arms of the falls. This is the way up and proves to be much easier than it looks. The hazard is getting wet, especially when trying to cross the outflow just in front of it. Most exciting is to do it in reverse, down-climbing, on a winter’s day when the falls are in full spate.
The single close-up shot is actually of a much smaller feature a few hundred metres away, a beautiful little waterfall called Janet’s Foss.
All shots taken with the Olympus OMD-EM10