Millstone Grit

click photo to enlarge
The Yorkshire Dales are known for their limestone scenery and drystone walls. Places such as Malham, Ingleton and Sedbergh are visited by tourists keen to see the upland farms, caves, potholes, wild landscape and small villages of this picturesque area. The district known as Craven, which includes the market town of Settle, is visited for similar reasons. However, in this location geological faulting has produced a land that departs, in some areas, from the stereotypical Dales landscape.

Here the various lines of the Craven Faults have produced places where the ubiquitous Carboniferous Limestone meets the Millstone Grit that dominates the nearby Forest of Bowland. At these boundaries the light coloured limestone gives way to areas where the rock is darker, less obviously stratified, has fewer outcrops, and produces less scree. Close inspection of Millstone Grit shows that, like limestone, it was laid down under the sea: the stone is flecked by water-smoothed pebbles of white quartz. In the Millstone Grit areas the fields are less well-drained, feature more rushes, and are more acidic: pine trees, silver birch, oak and rhododendrons will grow where woodland has been encouraged. However, the drystone walls that are characteristic of the limestone areas are also found on Millstone Grit, though here more of the building material was produced by small-scale quarrying rather than scree scavenging and field clearing.

Today's photograph shows Lambert Lane above Settle. This route connects an area of Millstone Grit with one of Carboniferous Limestone. In my shot the nearer walls are constructed of the darker stone, but the most distant ones are limestone. At points between both kinds of rock are found in the walls. I took this photograph for the complexity of the walls at this juncture - the lane, the curved sheep fold and the two walls in the foreground that serve to channel sheep to a tunnel under the lane into an adjoining field. All these walls were built as a result of the Enclosure Acts, and were probably erected in the nineteenth (or possibly eighteenth) century. I felt my image would benefit from a figure to give a visual focus and some scale, so I stayed behind whilst my wife strode on ahead, and I waited for my moment to press the shutter.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 90mm (180mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

The rhododendron tunnel

click photo to enlarge
As a child I used to love the rhodies (as we called the rhododendrons) that grew wild in certain spots on Yorkshire's Craven uplands. Their purple blossom that filled the woods in May simply outshone all the other flowers. Not only was there more of it, but the individual blooms, to an impressionable boy, were just so large. At any time of year they provided dense thickets that were great for dens and hide and seek, and the glossy evergreen leaves even provided pretty good shelter from the rain when you were caught without a coat - as boys often are!

I knew that the bushes grew only on the millstone grit side of the Craven Fault, but at that time didn't appreciate that the soil's acidity there was best for the plants, unlike that on the limestone side. Nor did I know that they weren't native to Britain, but had been in introduced by Conrad Loddiges in the 1760s, and that many cuttings were acquired in the Himalayan foothills. And I certainly didn't know that the luxuriant undergrowth of Rhododendron ponticum that I enjoyed so much was viewed by foresters and naturalists as an invasive weed, and that attempts were being made to control its rapid spread.

When I lived in Lancashire I came across it on the acidic soils of the Forest of Bowland. On more than one occasion its impenetrable mass blocked my way as I walked through woods. On the November day of the photograph above we came across a lot of it, still full of green leaf (and the odd rogue flower bud) where other trees and bushes were bare or brown. This tunnel, near the village of Scorton is mainly composed of arching rhododendron. I asked my wife to walk ahead so I could frame her with the branches and also silhouette her against the light of the lane beyond.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 68mm (136mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/80
ISO: 200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On