Settle Cave Walk

Lunch!

Recently I've been buying the Wainwright books, one of them covers walks on limestone in the Yorkshire Dales. This walk is described in detail in his book and looked like something we could do when the weather was poor. We've done several walks in the dales with the kids, usually heading to the high ground. This walk was different heading out of Settle and looping over higher ground and enabling us to explore several limestone caves on route.

We parked in Settle by the railway station and headed through town past the square and up Constitution Hill and followed the road up onto the fell. Once out in the open above the town we turned right and again headed upward. The weather was pretty poor and we were pretty much up in the clouds now. Following the line of a wall we headed along a dry broad valley. It was difficult to work out exactly where we were. There were several groups of young adults with large rucksacks on the main path it looked like they were all heading to Malham, the amount of noise they were making was incredible and it certainly wasn't very peaceful!

The kids were starting to get a bit board and wanted to know where all the caves were. The weather wasn't helping and it was difficult to judge how much further we should go. We decided to stop for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, there was a cave on the hillside so we sat in the entrance and had a break.

Outside Victoria Cave

Once we got moving again the weather cleared well enough for me to work out where we needed to head for Attermire Cave. I was surprised that Andrea was happy about this because the cave entrance is in the middle of a limestone cliff, gained by scrambling onto a ledge and traversing across at some height. If you didn't know where to look you wouldn't know the cave was there, indeed no one else was leaving the path to have a look.

It was pretty cool heading off the ledge, through the 'keyhole' and into the cave entrance. Once inside I took my rucksack off and got the torch out. Andrea wasn't into going any further and waited in the entrance. Jack, Finlay and me headed off around the corner at the end of the cave, it was amazing, we kept on heading further into the cave, Finlay decided he wanted to go back as he didn't feel comfortable, Jack and me kept going until we came to a small opening that would have meant a crawl through mud, just beyond here the passage opened into a chamber but we had come far enough. Finlay got his head around the dark and explored the caves with us.

Posing on a rock.

It was time to move on so we left the cave and headed back into the valley bottom and headed past Attermire Scar and on to Victoria Cave. The kids were now enthusiastic about the walk and needed very little encouragement to find our next adventure.

From the valley floor you don't see the size of Victoria Cave, its only when you scramble up the hillside that you see the huge opening.  Heading into the opening we soon reached a barrier with associated warning signs, which we promptly ignored! It was however pretty muddy, we did explore several of the passages and Jack and Findlay crawled through one of the passages to emerge outside, we also looked in a couple of the other caves in the area before moving on.

Inside Victoria Cave

Further up the valley we found Jubilee Caves, these can be seen from a distance. The kids headed off to explore on their own and surprisingly a couple of minutes later walked around the hillside back to the entrance, they had emerged from another entrance and walked back to us. Forcing me to follow them they insisted that I do the route. Emerging from the small hole was quite a squeeze, even for me. Jack and Finlay laughed at me and called me Homer as I struggled to pull myself through the tiny opening.

From here we walked back down a track and walked along the path above the valley before heading back down into Settle.

The kids loved this walk, these caves were relatively safe for us to do some amateur exploring, there are lots of other caves that are very dangerous and I certainly wouldn't have trusted the kids to go off exploring unless I was certain that they were safe.

It was a great way to make a walk slightly more interesting, I'd love yo go back to Attermire and push on further into the cave, maybe something to do later!