Gordale Scar

The limestone walls narrow until they almost touch above your head, and from the crack between them a waterfall thunders into a plunge pool where the path comes to a dead stop. Gordale Scar is a ravine so dramatic that James Ward's 1812 painting of it had to exaggerate nothing.

Gordale Scar was cut by glacial meltwater through the Great Scar Limestone, its overhanging cliffs reaching a hundred metres, and the sense of being swallowed by the Earth is visceral — the approach from Malham crosses flat meadow until the valley narrows without warning and the walls simply rise. The two-tiered waterfall closes the ravine like a full stop — the fragile tufa cascade is still forming, and the national park asks walkers not to climb it; the way to the pasture above goes round by path instead. Janet's Foss — a fairy-grotto fall in mossy woodland, everything the scar is not — waits on the path in, and the circuit linking Malham Cove, the scar and the limestone pavement makes one of the finest short walks in the Dales. Ward's fourteen-foot canvas of the ravine hangs in the Tate, and still isn't big enough.