Cribyn & N escarpment
from Pen y Fan96 The Great OutdoorsAugust 2019
planned non-firing weekends
annually; and there are a
further 15 short-notice days
when you can guarantee you
won’t be shot at. So, it kind of
puts the kibosh on spontaneity.
Thanks, though, to a happy
alignment of personal
commitments (lack of ),
weather (good) and military
manoeuvres (none), I managed
to complete a walk that’d long
been on my own to-do list...
After some road and
farmland walking, my partner
and I joined the Pennine
Way just east of Dufton.
Although I’d visited it on many
previous occasions, High
Cup was just as staggeringly,
dumbfoundingly, stop-you-
in-your-tracks impressive as
always. As the path hugged the
northern edge of the gill, I had
to keep pausing simply to take
it all in. An exposed line of the
Great Whin Sill forms a rim
of rock columns around the
broad, U-shaped valley of High
Cup Gill. It’s the same line of
dolerite that the most eye-
catching sections of Hadrian’s
Wall were built on.
From High Cup Nick, we
continued across some of
England’s highest moorland,
on the edge of the Moor House
and Upper Teesdale National
Nature Reserve, known for
its blanket bogs and rare
arctic-alpine plants such as the
spring gentian. After parting
company with the Pennine
Way, we were left to slog our
way across damp, tussocky
ground. I’d resigned myself to
the rest of the walk being of a
similar, pathless nature, so the
faint trail after fording Swarth
Beck came as a welcome relief.
It led us towards the head of
the beck and then disappeared.
This was some of the remotest
and quietest walking I’dexperienced in the North
Pennines.
We negotiated a lip of
limestone to drop into the
narrow upper reaches of
Scordale, dry at this point.
Only as the dale opened out
did a torrent come thundering
down from the west. Reaching
the long-disused lead
workings, we gazed up at the
bulging cliffs that bear down
on the valley: tiers of grey
outcrops, sandwiched between
the vivid green of limestone
grassland. On a beautiful
summer weekend and in a
county that receives millions of
visitors every year, how could
we have this fantastic place to
ourselves? It was only later,
when looking at my photos,
that I spotted the figures
trying to negotiate the cliffs.
Just three people though –
the first humans since we’d
left the Pennine Way.Further information
Maps: OS 1:25,000
Explorer sheet OL19
(Howgill Fells and Upper
Eden Valley)Transport: None, but
Appleby (5km from the
start) is on the Settle-Carlisle
Railway and several bus routesi
Information: Appleby
TIC, 01768 351177 &
visitappleby.com; for Warcop
range access information, phone
0800 7835 181 or visit gov.uk/
government/publications/
warcop-access-times[Captions clockwise from top]
High Cup in the North Pennines;
Maize Beck crosses the high
moorland; In Scordale, one of
the most dramatic valleys in the
North Pennines