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The Yorkshire Dales are a series of glacial valleys in Northern England, each with its own distinctive character and features, but all bonded by high fells, drystone walls,  field barns, tight knit villages and country pubs. 

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360-300 million years ago in the Carboniferous period it was very different. What’s now become the Yorkshire Dales lay beneath a tropical, shallow sea, abundant in life. Gradually, the remains of countless sea creatures settled on the seabed, and along with other sedimentary deposits, compacted to form repeated layers of shale, sandstone and limestone. Over millions of years the Earth’s tectonic plates shifted, pushing the land north and forcing it upwards to create the hills and mountains. Much more recently, but still ten thousand years ago, glacial activity re-shaped the landscape, forming U-shaped valleys, exposing limestone scars and sculpting the flat-topped hills that characterise today’s Dales.

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What nature created people began to shape. Woodland and scrub were cleared, marshland drained, land divided, settlements begun. Gradually, with time, the landscape became what we see today: the peatlands and heather, the pastures and meadows, the paths and tracks, the dry stone walls and field barns, the lime kilns and lead mines. All this work took place with no thought to aesthetics or landscape photography; this isn’t some manicured Tuscan landscape. The Dales has never been a place for easy living. The land here is shaped by necessity and hard labour, and yet, somehow, this coming together of geology, geography and human endeavour forged something unique and beautiful. From limestone pavements to meadowlands, glacial erratics to limestone gorges, ancient woodland to heather clad moors, limestone scars to abandoned mine workings, the legacy is a diverse topography, perfect to explore and photograph.