Walking in Yorkshire

Yorkshire and the Yorkshire Dales offer great opportunities for walking, and the Lake District (to the north-west) and the Peak District (to the south-west) aren't far away either.

If you do go walking, you are well advised to take the following with you:

• Good walking boots. They should have grippy soles, good support for your feet and ankles, and generally be sturdy.
• A good jacket, wind and water-tight, and preferably with a fleece jacket or some similar lining inside.
• Preferably, a detailed map of the area and a compass. Don't rely solely on route descriptions; these are often a few years old and situations may have changed. Also, the descriptions are often fairly ambiguous and you will need additional means (map, compass) to establish your whereabouts and direction.
• Some food and drinks. Many of the walks will take you to areas where you won't come across a teashop or pub for some hours at a stretch.
• Perhaps a small first-aid kit.

It is of course easiest if you carry your stuff in a rucksack or something similar.

Public footpaths and right of way

Many of the walks will use public footpaths — you may already have seen the signs when traveling through England. This is something that perhaps needs a bit of explaining: public footpaths designate paths that are property of some private farmer or landowner, but on which the public has a right of way (i.e., the right to use the path to cross the land). As a result, you will often be crossing meadows and moorland amidst sheep and cows, and sometimes even pass between farm houses. (One comfort: the sheep and cows are usually quite shy; the farmers may not be so.) The landowner has a duty to keep the path, fences, and stiles in good repair, although the actual quality varies a lot.

As a passer-by, you have some duties too. First of all, you are a guest on somebody else's property, so behave as such. Second, leave gates as you found them — either open or closed. (Whenever possible, use stiles to climb over walls and hedges, and don't bother with the gates at all.) Finally, behave responsibly in general: stick to the marked path (if any), don't disturb the animals, don't make loud noises, and don't leave your litter.

One caveat: since the public footpaths are privately owned and maintained, their situation can change in the space of a few years. This sometimes causes problems when you use descriptions of walks that refer to an older situation. Therefore, try to get hold of recently published or updated walks, and back up the description with the use of a good map, so you know where you are.

Maps

If you are looking for good maps of the Yorkshire Dales and surroundings, try the Ordnance Survey ones. These maps are on sale in the local tourist information offices (usually only a limited selection that covers the immediate vicinity). Furthermore, the better bookshops stock a large collection of them from most of England and Scotland. Ordnance Survey have four different series of maps that may be relevant to you:

• Landranger maps are on a 1:50000 scale and are general purpose. They are useful for general tourism with cars and bicycles, but perhaps not sufficiently detailed for walking. However, they are available for all of England and Scotland and each map covers 4 times the area of the more detailed maps (see next). You'll need map #104 for Leeds, Bradford, and the Harrogate area; other map numbers cover adjacent areas.
• Outdoor Leisure maps are on a 1:25000 scale and cover the National Parks and other areas of natural beauty. They include tourist information and enough detail for walking. However, they are only available for selected areas of England and Scotland (some other areas are covered by the Explorer series, see next). For the Yorkshire Dales, you will need maps #2 and #30, depending on where you want to go.
• Explorer maps are also on a 1:25000 scale and complement the Outdoor Leisure series by covering other well known, but lesser explored areas. The information on the maps is similar to the Outdoor Leisure series. We use map #27 for the Lower Wharfedale & Washburn Valley area.
• Pathfinder maps, finally, are 1:25000 maps that cover everything in England and Scotland not already covered by the Outdoor Leisure or Explorer series. They are not as easy to get as the other series, but might be required if you go to less-travelled areas.

If you don't know which 1:25000 map you need, you may call Ordnance Survey to request a mapping index. The number is (01703) 792763 — it's a 24-hour answerphone where you can leave your details. The index comes free of charge (at the moment of writing).

Books

There are lots of books and leaflets with descriptions of walks, ranging from Yorkshire Dales Teashop Walks to description of the Penine Way (a long-distance footpath across the Penines and parts of the Yorkshire Dales). As with the maps, you will find them on sale in tourist information offices, bookshops, and lots of other places. A few hints:

• Ordnance Survey have quite a few Leisure Guides that provide general tourist information along with descriptions of walks. These tend to be easily accessible and well documented.
• Walking Country is a series with pocket-sized books containing some 20 walks each in different parts of Yorkshire. They are written by different authors, and are generally quite good. However, they are not always very precise (distances from one point to the next are often vague, if at all mentioned) and some descriptions need a bit of "interpreting". One of our favourite examples is a passage where, confronted with a choice of 5 (!) directions, the author cheerfully advises us to take "the most promising looking" one.
• Other sources for walks include dozens of other more or less locally produced books and leaflets, and of course maps. However, we usually find it easier to explore existing walks — saves quite a bit of research and hassle.

As mentioned earlier, be sure to get recently published or updated books or descriptions, since the situation in the countryside can sometimes changes quite dramatically (or worse yet, subtly) in the course of a few years.

See our Top Withins page for some nice pictures of walking in Yorkshire.

	Copyright © 1999-2000 Anne-Wil Harzing and Ron van der Wal. All rights reserved. Legal notices and colophon. This page was last modified on 7-11-99 19:03