A Week in The Yorkshire Dales #5 - Exploring Malham Village

Hi there everyone 😀

For today's post we are still in the lovely Yorkshire Dales. After having a day out in the car visiting Skipton and Grassington on Monday, the plan for Tuesday was to leave the car well alone and explore Malham village ... and that is exactly what we did.

We had a couple of Geocaches on the cards, one of which was a two mile wander around the village collecting clues on the way, which would reveal the final location.

The route went right past the front door of Woodside Cottage so we picked it up there.

We didn’t have a good start ... the first clue was to count the numbers of sheep on some big metal gates, but there was renovation work under way and the gates were no longer to be found.

We decided to carry on anyway and hope that we would be able to work out what the missing number was later on ... we knew that all of the numbers we collected needed to add up to 49, so if we managed to find everything else we needed we should be ok.

Our walk took us to the centre of the village ...

... and past The Buck Inn, the second of the pubs in the village, which we had not yet frequented ...

We carried on past the local smithy, which was all closed up for now ...

... and headed over the first of the three clapper bridges that we would be crossing on our walk. This one had been adorned courtesy of The Smithy ...
We carried in alongside the beck for a short while ...
This was the footpath that led to Janet's Foss and Goredale Scar, but that wasn't for us today ...

We found what we were looking for and retraced our steps back across the bridge. We headed past the cafe where we’d enjoyed chip butties the other day and up to the National Park Centre. It was pretty grey overhead and I think you can just about see the spots of rain that had started to fall on the chalk board ...

We then took a bit of a loop, heading up along a track away from the road ...

... and taking the footpath back towards Pikedaw, though we wouldn’t be walking that far ...

It was a bit stony underfoot but it was a decent footpath and took us pretty much parallel with the road through the village ...

A bit further along and we took a right, heading back down towards the road ...

... and Beck Hall, where we passed this collection of quirky birdhouses ...
... before crossing the second of the clapper bridges ... the beck was a lot less fearsome than it had been when we’d walked this way earlier in the week ...
We headed up away from the beck, along footpaths and green lanes...

We ended ended up coming back out on the road to the sight of this handsome fellow ...
It was but a short walk back down the road to the village and The Lister Arms ...

As if we'd planned it that way, we had collected all of our clues so retired to what had become our favourite sofa in the corner to work out where we needed to go next, whilst enjoying a very nice lunch, and finishing off a couple of The Express crosswords whilst there ...

We were very pleased to find that the missing gates had not caused us a problem and three hours later we emerged and headed back towards the National Park Centre to try and find the final location of the Cache.

We headed back up the track we’d walked earlier, with some real weather threatening ...

... passing a field full of spring lambs, which we stopped and watched for a while ...


We also passed a rather muddy enclosure where three sad and lonely looking horses were more than happy to say hello ...
Even in the dull and grey of today the views looking back down the way we’d come were a real treat ... it really did feel like we were in the middle of nowhere, though in reality we were only a stones throw from the village. It was real Yorkshire ...
The daffodils gave a really bright pop of colour in the otherwise drab surroundings, but I do wonder who would have planted these, all the way up here ...

There was certainly plenty of zing in the moss and the ferns too. It most definitely was not all grey ...

We found what we were looking for, courtesy of the National Park rangers and it was time for us to head back down into the village ...

... and back to Woodside cottage to curl up on the squishy sofas for a lazy evening in front of the TV and the log fire ...

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