Features of Our Three Walks in the Yorkshire Dales

On our three walks whose features you see described here, we visited the three peaks, namely Whernside, Ingleborough and Penyghent. The walks were all circular, and two started from our residence, the "Old School House". Total ascent for the walks was of the order of ½ to ⅔ Km. Our weather on each day was mainly a comfortable mixture of sunshine and clouds. Nice for walking!

On our third day, our walk took us up to Penyghent.

Now prepare ye for some plots and graphs. Not too overwhelming, but hopefully quite interesting! You will see here:

• Where is Chapel-le-Dale?
• An Outline Map of Our Walks
• Height Profiles of Our Walks
• Some Facts and Figures
• Weather, Ground Conditions & Signposting
• Timing & Speed
• Track Files
• And Finally

Where is Chapel-le-Dale?

The hamlet of Chapel-le-Dale is in the Shire County of North Yorkshire. Chapel-le-Dale is on the B6255 from Ingleton to Ribblehead and it is about 1 mile from the famous Ribblehead Viaduct and from Ribblehead Station. The station is on the Settle & Carlisle Line and the viaduct carries the said railway line across Batty Moss in the Ribble Valley.

Here you see a "sketch" of the U.K.
showing the approximate locations of Chapel-le-Dale and London.
This "map" is from the Microsoft® PowerPoint® Clip Art Library originally supplied with versions of MS Office®.

If you espouse the quantitative in life, we have some numbers for you! What are these "great circle distances"? If you haven't met these before, I'll try, in my humble way, to give a little bit of an explanation. A great circle is the largest circle that can be drawn on the surface of a given sphere. As a consequence, its centre coincides with the centre of the sphere. We assume the earth to be spherical. It makes our maths "reasonably" easy and gives us a maximum error of about 0.1% in our distance values. Not that much really! Can't complain!

If you espouse the quantitative in life, here you duly see some numbers!

Our "straight line" distances are actually "great circle" distances on the earth's surface. Indeed, we can speak of the distances as the "hypothetical crow" (cornix hypothetica) flies.

Cornix Hypothetica, our hypothetical crow,
isn't any old bird, as we should know.
Cornix Hypothetica! Many miles for us you go,
with many a "straight line" o'er Earth to show.

Outline Map of Our Circular Walks to the "Three Peaks"

There were at three walks. These were to Whernside on Saturday 27th August (marked blue), to Ingleborough on Sunday 28th August (marked red) and to Penyghent on Monday, 29th August (marked green). For clarity, the same colours are used for the height profiles and the summary figures you'll find further below. "Golden arrows" in the map indicate the direction of a walk. Where the two paths overlap spatially on the map, the colour of the later walk takes priority - because of the way my spreadsheet works! All walks were circular, the first two being based on Chapel-le-Dale and the third on Horton-in-Ribblesdale.

Outline Map of Our Walks
Y and X axes are in degrees latitude and longitude respectively.
"minus" indicates degrees longitude west of Greenwich.

The map grid scales translate to 1.112 Km per 0.01° latitude and a mean of 0.650 Km per 0.01° longitude, all when using 6371.0 Km as the volumetric mean radius of the earth - as per the WGS84 standard! In Scales, in the Lake District, the longitude scale is less (as expected), with a mean of 0.644 Km per 0.01° longitude; in fact, in doesn't take too much brain power to conclude that in Scales the distance is 6 metres per 0.01° longitude less than in Chapel-le-Dale!

Because we don't live on a flat earth - unless you are a convinced "flat-earther" - maps are inevitably a distortion of what is. In other words, it's all a matter of mapping a curvaceous surface onto a flat surface. We don't want to carry curvaceous representations of the terrain on our walks, do we? In our case, the northern length of our map grid is stretched out by an extra 0.44 %, to make it the same on the page as the length of the southern part of our map grid. Not that much for hiking purposes really! Can't complain.

Height Profiles of Our Walks

It's of course fine to say that we reached about 687 metres above sea level, but what's the significance of that? Probably, of greater interest when it comes to considering personal achievements, is the total ascent (which usually requires greater effort than the descent). The total ascent was, as expected (!), greater than the difference between maximum and minimum heights above mean sea level as defined by the OS® reference at Newlyn in Cornwall.

Height Profile
X and Y axes are in units of metres and kilometres respectively.
(The height of Penyghent is given by the first (left hand) peak of the green plot.)

Some Facts and Figures

Here are some "vital statistics" in metric and imperial units. The total length of the walk is measured on a conceptual "flat" plane at mean sea level, WGS84 style. Of course, as mentioned above, the total ascent exceeds the difference between maximum and minimum elevations; I'd suspect things, if the reverse transpired!

"Walk facts and figures"

However, the maximum elevation on each of the three walks is below the official maximum height for that particular walk; in addition, the start elevations for Saturday and Sunday differ by 1 metre. Now, I plotted our walks by hand on my return home. While I tried to be reasonably accurate, even OS® maps don't display all the possible paths on mountainous terrains. In addition, there are differences in the paths as given by OS® and Google® maps. Added to this, there is the fact that occasionally we make - usually reasonably safe and legitimate - short cuts across open access terrain. These short cuts may miss out the actual peaks!! Therefore, the above table should be seen as indicative.

Weather, Ground Conditions & Signposting

On any walk there are considerations which are very real but tantalizingly out of ready reach of those who wish to espouse a numerical approach to many of life's activities. Here are three considerations for starters.

• Weather: On all three days, Saturday to Monday, we had a mixture of sunshine and clouds. On Sunday and Monday, it stayed dry, but on Saturday, some rain showers entered the mix.


• Ground Conditions: There was hardly any mud.


• Signposting: Unfortunately, path markers could not always be found.

Timing and Speed

It's one thing to describe the terrain over which we walk. It's quite another to ask how we personally respond to walking over that terrain. There are a number of considerations, of which timing and speed can be taken as starting points. If you wanted to, you could, for each walk, ascertain start and end times and times spent not walking (e.g. for lunch). Knowing the total distance covered in the walk and time spent actually walking, you obviously can determine the speed, which typically is about 2½ mph for a walk on flat terrain, reducing to (e.g.) 1½ mph on a more challenging terrain. I probably would not find too many takers for this information were I to try to calculate it accurately and precisely for each of the walks described here! We certainly finished each walk well before sunset!

Track Files

If you are keen to see our walks superimposed on Ordnance Survey® (OS) maps or Google© maps, then you can use the following files to do so. As mentioned above, the numerical data in these files have been hand-plotted by me (no GPS!) on my return to the south-east. The data are based on WGS84. For copyright reasons, I do not show the OS-based or Google-based maps here.

Here are our three Chapel-le-Dale walks: Whernside, Ingleborough, and Penyghent.

And Finally - a Matter of Practicality

Any map is an approximate representation of what is. Practicality and scale are relevant considerations. We are not dealing with a planning application calling for detailed spatial descriptions of intricate boundaries. For us in the hiking community, the degrees of accuracy and precision should be just enough to give us useable and helpful knowledge of the terrain about us and beneath our feet. I hope my humble endeavours on this page are in this respect interesting for, and useful to, you my reader!

Appendix: Google® Map

Here you will see a Google® view at a height of 847 metres above the area around the Old School Bunkhouse in Chapel-le-Dale. In order to explore the wider area, you can of course alter the detail (+ -) and change from "Satellite" to "Map" settings.