Climbing and Adventuring in Malham Cove 鈥� CDT Away Day 2024
The Graphene NOWNANO CDT recently enjoyed their annual Away Day. This event gives the PhD students a brief respite from the hard research they鈥檝e been doing and a chance to enjoy the great outdoors around Manchester. Previous Away Days have been spent abseiling and problem solving in Edale and walking the Monsal Trail in the Peak District.
This year we decided to go somewhere new. The CDT ventured to Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales for a day of hiking and rock climbing. This was hosted by our friends at . As usual we were also joined by our four-legged friends Monty and Max.
Malham Cove is a 70m high curving cliff of white-grey limestone near the village of Malham in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Formed by the erosion of limestone by ice and water, this vast cliff has been attracting visitors for hundreds of years. The CDT went on a hiking expedition through the Cove and the surrounding area. Our route was about 6.3 miles in length and took about 4陆 hours to complete.
Starting in Malham, we walked down the Pennine Way and then followed Gordale Beck upstream to the beauty spot of Janet鈥檚 Foss. This is a waterfall in Gordale beck which forms a wonderfully clear blue natural pool. Named after a Queen of Fairies who supposedly lives in the cave behind the waterfall (Foss being an Old Norse word for waterfall), the spot is popular with wild swimmers. None of the CDT students were up for this as it was a fairly chilly April Day. However, it was a perfect place for exploring and some great photos, and for Max the Labrador to contemplate the marvels of glacial erosion.
We then followed the beck to Gordale Scar. This is an enormous gorge on the same limestone fault as Malham Cove, but here glacial meltwater has eroded a deep gorge over thousands of years. One of the most famous spots in the National Park, like Malham Cove it has been attracting visitors like us for centuries. Although there is a path through Gordale, the phrase boulder-filled-gorge-with-waterfall-running-through-it would be more accurate. It was the task of the CDT students to scale this with the help of the Carnegie climbing experts. Max and Monty didn鈥檛 bring their climbing hats and took the long way round with dog handlers Chris and Kasia.
After successfully scaling the gorge and waterfalls (no injuries or soakings to report) and a spot of lunch we walked over the hills along an old Roman road to the Pennine Way again. Joining the path a couple of miles north of Malham, we followed the track south through the hills to Malham Cove clifftop. This provided spectacular views of Malham and the surrounding Dales. We also learned about the limestone pavements the Cove is famous for. Found in few other places in Britain, the pavements were formed during the ice ages when glacial ice sheets exposed the limestone and millennia of freezing and thawing created a maze of crevices. The horizontal slabs of limestone are called clints and the vertical cracks are called grykes and are of scientific interest due to their rich diversity of plant species.
After Malham Cove, we followed the Pennine Way back into Malham and to the Lister Arms Pub for some well-earned pints with stew and chips. Overall, we all had a great day out on a bright day in Yorkshire and would happily visit again!
- Chris Hoole