Helen Stephenson's Yorkshire Holiday Pictures - October, 2007 - Littondale and Malham

Kilnsey Crag is a spectacular rock outcrop with a big overhang. It's on the B6160 Kettlewell Road, which we didn't actually take all the way to Kettlewell, as we wanted to turn off towards Arncliffe a little bit past Kilnsey.

At Arncliffe, we turned towards Malham and started to climb, stopping to look back at the village behind us and the hills around us, with their outcroppings of limestone.

We saw some sheep where we stopped to take photographs. Far from running away from us, they came as close as possible with the expectation of being fed!

We climbed up onto the exposed moorland and we passed Malham Tarn, but did not stop to view it, as the hours of daylight were getting short and we were running short of time. In fact, we could easily have spent a whole day or even longer in the Malham area. We came to see the waterfall known as Janet's Foss, but it's only one of several interesting sites around Malham. The others are the Tarn I just mentioned; Malham Cove, a huge limestone amphitheatre which was once a waterfall before the stream feeding it went underground, and whose limsteone cliffs we only glimpsed in the mirrors as we went by; and Gordale Scar, a large collapsed limestone cave system.

One thing that most of these sites have in common is that there isn't parking nearby, but visitors are expected to walk some distance from Malham village, and there simply wasn't time to do that amount of walking on an autumn afternoon, so we chose to walk to Janet's Foss and remember the other sites as being worth a return visit if we're up in Yorkshire again another year.

Our walk to Janet's Foss took us through the village of Malham, where the village pub was covered in creeper which had gone a glorious shade of red with the arrival of autumn.

We left the village behind us and walked along a narrow country lane, admiring the local scenery as we went.

Eventually we arrived at our goal, and found that above the waterfall the little stream which feeds the waterfall races over rapids. My tripod got set up and I enjoyed photographing the mini-rapids.

Then it was time to descend down to the waterfall itself. There was an informative sign provided, and I've included a photograph of it here. It will open up larger than you probably have your screen size set in order for the writing to be legible, but you should be able to navigate around it with the side bars on your browser window.

Janet's Foss spills over into a beautiful clear plunge pool, and I have to say that if the weather had been a bit warmer and there weren't other people about, I don't think I could have resisted going in!

It was an almost completely still day when we visited Janet's Foss. These pictures resulted from exposures long enough to show leaf movement had there been any. (Three were modest shutter speeds of 1/15, 1/10 and 1/6, while the one with the rocks in the foreground was exposed for 15 seconds.) We were really very lucky in the October weather that day: it was ideal waterfall weather - bright but not too bright and no wind to speak of.

Janet, the fairy after whom the waterfall is named, is supposed to live in a cave behind the waterfall. This cave is alongside the pool rather than behind the waterfall, so it probably isn't Janet's cave. The light was failing badly by the time I took this picture. You might understand just how little light was left when I tell you that this picture took 6 seconds to expose at f8 and ISO 200 and that I made it a bit brighter later in PhotoShop! It's just as well my tripod was out!

After my last hurrah with the cave, I collapsed my tripod and we put our cameras away and started the walk back to Malham. It was completely dark before we got back to where we parked the car.