Watlowes Dry Valley, Yorkshire Dales, Summer/Autumn
We finally got a week off.
The pandemic, and its subsequent lockdown, has been pretty intense for me and Lisabet. I took on extra roles and responsibilities, with less available work time, and Lisabet’s job changed fundamentally. And we continued working throughout the lockdown.
So we were so ready for a break, which finally arrived at the end of August.
We stayed a few nights in a cosy B&B just south of Skipton, a beautiful market town on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales. On our way we took a scenic detour and stopped at Malham Tarn for a little stroll down to the Watlowes Dry Valley and back.
As its name suggests, the Watlowes Dry Valley is in fact the site of an extinct waterfall. The outflow from Malham Tarn once channeled out a deep gorge and powerful waterfall from all the surrounding limestone, before turning southeast and dropping over Malham Cove, in what surely would’ve been the UK’s biggest waterfall (estimates suggest the waterfall over Malham Cove would’ve been 980ft wide and dropped 260 ft).
However, at some point in history, the outflow from Malham Tarn stopped running through Watlowes and Malham Cove dried up. Nowadays, the stream suddenly disappears into the ground 500 m from the tarn, in an area now known as Watersinks. Below here, the stream travels through a myriad of underground caves before emerging above land once again at Aire Head, just south of Malham village.
All photos taken on a Fujifilm X-T2 with a Fujinon XF 18–55mm f/2.8–4.0 lens using a customised Velvia film profile.