The Yorkshire Dales enjoyed a special place in the hearts of 18th century tourists. Dr Bill Mitchell looks at a special time in High Craven’s history

From about 1760 until 1820, the caves, crags and chasms of High Craven were visited by people “of taste and leisure”. They were engrossed in the cult of the picturesque. This so-called Romantic Period was in truth a revolt against the sterility of classical conventions – art, literature, music and architecture.

War with the French discouraged visits to the continent.

A few intrepid and perceptive tourists discovered worthy natural spectacles in Craven, Lakeland, Wales and western Scotland.

Their writings attracted others. From the 1770s onwards, a tour of the mountains, lakes and dales of Cumberland and Westmorland was enhanced by trips to the awesome caves and other great limestone features in remote parts of Craven.

Thomas Gray (1769) went to Gordale Scar, approaching it from Malham village.

The waterfall, tumbling in an awesome chasm, greatly impressed him. Wrote Gray: “From its very base it begins to slope forward over you in one black and solid mass without any crevice in its surface and overshadows half the area below with its dreadful canopy where I stand.” I will never forget the effect, during a visit I paid to the Tate Gallery in London, of viewing James Ward’s painting of Gordale Scar – a massive canvas completed in 1815, which is just within the aforementioned Romantic Age.

Here, in rich paints, were the familiar limestone masses, with cliffs looming and overhanging, mostly in shadow.

Ward’s patron was Lord Ribblesdale so he included in the foreground of the painting, as a romantic touch, one of the white bulls of the herd in the Lord’s park at Gisburn.

Writers of the Romantic Age saw and commented on – goats. The Rev John Hutton, a Kendal clergyman, noted that “some goats frisked about with seeming wanton carelessness on the brink of this dreadful precipice.”

Thomas Gray saw animals that were equally adventuresome. “One of them danced, and scratched an ear with its right foot, in a place where I would not have stood stock-still.”

The aforementioned Hutton, a most romantic visitor, was especially interested in the Craven underworld and jotted down facts and impressions in a book entitled Tour to the Caves, which was published in 1781.

He rightly deduced, from fossil evidence in high places, that the limestone had a marine origin. Being a cleric, he had to reconcile this with the Biblical story of The Flood!

Hutton visited Hurtle Pot, a picturesque gash in the limestone of Chapel-le-Dale, observing that “all around the top of this horrid place are trees, which grow secure from the axe: their branches almost meet in the centre and spread a gloom over a chasm dreadful enough of itself…”

Two other old-time attractions in the Ingleton district were Yordas Cave, in Kingsdale, and Weathercote Cave in Chapel-le-Dale, the latter being a gash in the limestone with a natural arch and a waterfall 77 feet high, the water appearing from beneath a wedged boulder, which was christened Mahommet’s Coffin. Hutton flamboyantly labelled Weathercote “The most surprising natural curiosity of the kind in the island of Great Britain.”

William Wilson, an old soldier who was one of the Guides to the Caves, lit up the calcite formations with a “lanthorn and candlestick.”

Houseman (1800) accompanied Wilson to Yordas Cave where the guide “now places himself upon a fragment of the rock and strikes up his lights, consisting of six or eight candles, put into as many holes of a stick.”

With each, and by the help of a long pole fixed therein, he could illuminate a considerable space.”

The Romantic Age had begun to wane in 1837, with the discovery of further reaches of Clapham Cave. Henceforth, the scientific aspect would be stressed, though the boggart who was said to reside in Hurtle Pot, just behind St Leonard’s Church in Chapel-le-Dale, was said to drown people in he pool at the bottom – a pool which for many years contained dark-toned trout.

A courting couple, walking near the hole, fled when they heard weird strains. Shortly afterwards, a musician emerged with a violin, on which he had been practising.

On the banks of the Ribble, up-river from the packhorse bridge at Stainforth, lay the unimpressive mouth of a natural shaft that became known as Robin Hood’s Mill.

When a miller was said to work his grindstones on a Sunday his premises sank into the ground. The millstones continued to revolve. Potholers who investigated the shaft in the 1930s had subtly altered its shape. The grinding sound was not heard again.