DISCOVER Upper Wharfedale
Up hill, down dale
Mountain high, valley deep. Walk the best of both in the Yorkshire Dales, high up on Buckden Pike, down low in Upper Wharfedale.
IT’S REMARKABLE HOW many of our sayings and expressions relate to up and down. Life is full of ups and downs, people will tell you. You’re on a real high. You’re feeling low. You’re on a downer. You’re on the up. This area is coming up, you know. Up, Up and Away, sang The 5th Dimension. Down Down Deeper and Down, sang Status Quo.
This means that down gets a bad press. It gets commandeered as a way of expressing unhappy things. (Although interestingly, ‘downhill’ can go either way: “things went downhill quickly” suggests things got worse, whereas “it’s all downhill from here” suggests that easier times lie ahead; go figure.)
But here on Country Walking, we love down. A valley is as magnificent as a mountain; as full of promise and beauty, majesty and intrigue. And of course, without the valley, the mountain has no context. There’s also nothing wrong with a walk being slightly easier, as valley walks invariably are, compared to hill-climbs. Easy is good. Easy is kind. And you’ll have just as much fun in the lush woodland by the river as you will on that bald, rough summit. Possibly more.
So we cast around for a perfect weekend combining up and down: a day on a hill, followed by a day in the valley beneath it. The full context of a place; macro and micro; the vast canvas of the summit panorama and the intimate close-up of stream, field and tree.
We came looking in the Yorkshire Dales. And, of course, we found it.
Up hill
Buckden Pike is one of the upland leviathans of the Yorkshire Dales. At 2303 feet (702 metres) above sea level, it is the seventh highest peak in the national park, only seven feet shorter than its neighbour, Great Whernside (not to be confused with the other Whernside above Ribblehead). But while it isn’t the loftiest hill in the locality, it has all the gravity and allure of other peaks located at the ends of valleys, just as Great Gable does above Wasdale Head in the Lake District. It is the fell at the head of the table.
Several paths converge on Buckden Pike. Most walkers set off from the car park in the hill’s namesake village, where a stony bridleway called Buckden Rake pulls steeply north up onto a shelf of limestone overlooking the hamlet of Hubberholme, at the junction of Wharfedale and Langstrothdale.
