North Pennines Waterfalls, County Durham, Summer
Woohoo for a week off! With the Lake District as rammed as it is at the moment, let’s go somewhere and l’al bit different.
The North Pennines AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) is a favourite of ours but remains relatively untouched by us. We’ve explored arguably the jewel of the North Pennines, High Cup Nick, many times. But another absolutely stunning part of the area is the three main waterfalls: High Force, Low Force, and Cauldron Snout.
Long-time followers of this blog may remember our last excursion to High Force and Low Force, last year. The two waterfalls are a geology student’s dream and truly spectacular. But the third waterfall, Cauldron Snout, is often missed out on compared to the other two. That’s because it’s many miles further up the River Tees, near Cow Green Reservoir. Like High Force and Low Force, Cauldron Snout is the result of the outflow of Cow Green Reservoir passing over the whin sill; a layer of prehistoric super-hard dolerite volcanic rock that has left pillars and columns. The waterfall has eroded the softer rock around, leaving the harder columns of whin sill standing.
Cauldron Snout “only” drops about 60 m, all in all, but does so steeply down 180 m of the gorge, making it one of the longest waterfalls in England. The last time we visited it was many years ago in between Christmas and New Year, and a lot of the rock around the waterfall was covered in ice, making it a treacherous task to navigate. This time, we managed to scramble all the down alongside the waterfall. It was immense.
All photos shot on my Fujifilm X-T2 using my three prime lenses: a Samyang 35mm f/1.2, a Laowa 9mm f/2.8, and an adapted Pentax SMC 55mm f/2.0. Images developed using one of RNI Film’s Kodachrome profiles, finished in Affinity Photo.