Carlisle to Settle on foot

This is a longer version, originally written for FOSCL (Friends of the Settle–Carlisle Line)

Riding on the Settle to Carlisle railway gives spectacular views of the scenery through which the line passes. Ploughing into cuttings, diving through tunnels and soaring over viaducts give an impression of the terrain the line had to cut through. But it is not the best way to appreciate the magnificent structures or the engineering of the line itself. To do that you have to look at them from a different angle – from the ‘outside’ – which you can’t do from the train. There are places you can see the line from the road but there are far more if you are prepared to walk away from the roads rather than be confined to a car.

I first became aware of the line from several miles away while walking the Pennine Way in 1970. Sitting eating lunch at Cam End, an ancient junction of Roman roads, I saw a line across the landscape, including the vast span of Ribblehead Viaduct in the distance. Some years later I saw a poster about the line being under threat, joined FOSCL, and got involved – in a small way but I did speak at the TUCC hearing in Carlisle.

I visited the line whenever I could, and in August 1989 with two of my children I walked from Carlisle to Settle. I forget what sparked the idea but I do remember being egged on to do it by my 12 year old daughter. We were all seasoned fell walkers, and the children had all walked up their first peak at the age of three. I’m also a photographer, and I wanted to get more pictures of the line and its surrounding scenery.

The walk took 6½ days. I had a week’s leave. but I didn’t want to be walking in the crowds on the Bank Holiday. We started after lunch on Saturday, having taken the train from Berkshire to Carlisle, and we arrived in Settle on Friday afternoon, taking the train home on Saturday.

The route I planned broadly followed the line but with diversions over nearby hills where appropriate. I wanted to maximise the chance of getting pictures of trains where we met the line. These days I would study RealTimeTrains to find when train passed points along the route but in 1989 all I had was the timetable. I created a spreadsheet (also pretty new at the time) with a row for each mile along the track between Settle and Carlisle. I added each station, and all the bridges, tunnel mouths, etc on our route, on the appropriate rows. Then with a column for each train I entered the scheduled times at each station, and I used a formula to interpolate the time, in each direction, at each intermediate mile point.

Armed with that table, I knew whether it was worth hurrying to reach the line at any point, and once there I knew whether it would be worth waiting a while for a train. In 1989 there were no freight trains to complicate the picture, and it worked pretty well.

Starting at lunchtime to walk the 12 miles from Carlisle to Armathwaite proved to be over ambitious. It should have been easy walking along the valley with no significant hills but we ended up fighting through overgrown paths, and backtracking to find an alternative route when they were impassable, so we arrived rather late.

The next day was planned to be longer but to ease the pressure we we‘cheated’ with a leisurely start to catch the morning train from Armathwaite to Langwathby, and then walked the 10 miles to Long Marton. From there it was an easy 10 miles to Appleby, where we arrived in time for lunch and spent a sunny afternoon relaxing and exploring.

The next day’s walk to Kirkby Stephen we found more paths on the map that didn’t exist so had to improvise. When we went through Crosby Garret we looked for the Post Office, shown on the map, but failed to find it so we couldn’t buy the hoped for ice-creams. I did though get a picture of a DMU crossing the viaduct above the village.

South of Kirkby Stephen we left the valley for some hill walking. The wind and rain made the climbing miserable, and there was no view because we were in cloud. We sheltered in some ruined workings for an early lunch and pressed on up the hill. By the time we reached Mallerstang Edge the cloud had lifted and the rain had stopped – but not the wind, which was even stronger. The views were superb, across to the railway a mile away and 1000 feet below us. We ended with a pleasant walk along a green lane past a lime kiln, but then we arrived at the Moorcock Inn before it opened and had to sit huddled outside in the cold for an hour before we could check in.

The next morning was damp, and we were again in cloud as we walked over the Coal Road to Dent station, but it cleared up for the valley walk from Cowgill to Dent Head. Thanks to my table of train times I got pictures of a 47 at Dent station and a DMU emerging from the north portal of Blea Moor tunnel. But what the timetable didn’t include was the steam hauled special that passed 300 feet above us as on the hillside between Arten Gill and Dent. We followed the track used by the constructors, past the air shafts over Blea Moor, down to Ribblehead and then on to Selside for the night.

Our final day’s walk to Settle was a gentle 10 miles down the valley. We had to divert when we found the footbridge where I planned crossing the river had been swept away the previous year. The nearest alternative 'bridge' was just a narrow piece of timber with a flimsy wire handrail but we got across it safely. We had a leisurely lunch by the river at Stainforth before continuing to Settle.

We stayed at White Friars, and our room faced the railway. So when in the early hours I was woken by the sound of a train I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera and got a (not very good) picture of a Pacer in West Yorkshire PTA livery. We returned to Berkshire via Carlisle, to use the return half of our tickets and to get a final view of the line from the ‘inside’.

We had walked 83 miles at a total cost for three of us including travel, accommodation, meals, maps and gifts of £545.

Pictures

For pictures, see the earlier article 

All material Copyright © 2024 John Harrison.