Great Whernside Circular Walk: Starbotton and the River Wharfe

Hag Dyke and Boulders on the Great Whernside Circular Walk From Kettlewell

Start your Great Whernside circular walk in the Yorkshire Dales village of Kettlewell, parking in the Yorkshire Dales National Park pay and display car park. Leave the car park by the main exit and turn left into the village. Just before the bridge over Kettlewell Beck, turn right onto the road signposted to Kettlewell Camping, and follow it to the village maypole, which stands within a circular seating area in the middle of the crossroads. Turn left here, signposted to the church and the Dales Way, and walk up to the King’s Head public house.

At the King’s Head, rather than following the road round to the left, carry straight on in the direction of the Dales Way signs. The road leads past houses and cottages with Kettlewell Beck on your left. Stay on the tarmac lane as it leaves the village. Ignore the public footpath on your right signposted to Conistone, and ignore the public bridleway a little further on, also on your right, signposted to Whernside Pastures. Neither of these is part of your route. Where the lane bends left over a single-arched stone bridge, carry straight on, following the sign for Great Whernside via Hag Dyke.

Continue along the stone track to a second single-arched stone bridge near Kettlewell Camping. Immediately after the bridge, turn right onto the public footpath signposted to Hag Dyke and Providence Pot. Go through the gated gap in the wall and follow the grassy path uphill, signposted to Hag Dyke. The path is wide and easy to follow as it climbs steeply, and a wooden footpath signpost soon confirms you are heading the right way. Stay on this well-defined path for about a mile, ignoring any side tracks to left and right.

On reaching the youth hostel at Hag Dyke, go through the gate and bear right, signposted public footpath to Great Whernside. Follow the path round the right-hand side of the building, then turn left and walk past the rear of it. From here the path becomes rocky and stony as it climbs with a dry stone wall on your left, heading for the boulder-strewn brow of the hill. Pass the cairns at the top of the brow and continue on the grassy path, now aiming for the summit of Great Whernside.

This next mile is marked by wooden posts with yellow painted tops, and the ground can be boggy after wet weather. The gradient eases for a while before rising more steeply for the final push to the top, and on a clear day the summit boulders stay in view as you climb. You will leave the summit heading north, following the visible ridge to the left of the boulder field, so take a moment to perhaps get your bearings ready for when you reach the summit. Follow the path all the way to the cairn and triangulation pillar. The summit marks roughly the first quarter of your Great Whernside circular walk.

Stand at the triangulation pillar with your back to the views and to the way you have come, facing the gate in the fence. Look to your left, beyond the large cairn, and you will see a faint path running north across the mountain top. Follow it, keeping the fence on your right. The path runs broadly parallel to the fence but stays a few metres away from it rather than hard against it. Continue north along the ridge, passing more boulders, until you reach the first of a series of yellow-topped wooden posts.

At this first post the path splits. Take the left-hand fork, which drops slightly downhill and moves further from the fence. More yellow-topped posts confirm you are on the right line as you head north across the top. The path eventually begins to descend the mountainside and brings you to a stile at a spot called Black Dike Hole. Cross the stile and follow the path steeply downhill. After about a third of a mile the gradient eases and the path crosses ground that can be boggy in wet weather. Stay on the main path for roughly another third of a mile to reach a minor road beside a cattle grid. This is the Kettlewell to Coverdale road, which climbs out of Wharfedale at Park Rash.

Cross the road and take the grassy track that bears round to the left. It draws close to a bend in the dry stone wall on your left before pulling away again, then meets another grassy bridleway coming in from the right. This is Starbotton Road. Carry straight on along it, and where the bridleway once again comes close to the wall, pass through the gated gap. You are now about halfway round your Great Whernside circular walk.

Follow the bridleway straight ahead around the head of the valley, broadly keeping the dry stone wall on your left. At times the wall is right beside you and at others the path swings further from it. After a little over half a mile the bridleway splits in two. Take the right-hand fork signposted to Starbotton and carry on downhill across an area known as Sandy Gate. This is Starbotton Cam Road, a wall-enclosed old drovers’ road that zigzags down the hillside for the best part of a mile towards the village. As you near Starbotton the stony track gives way to concrete for the final descent. At the tarmac crossroads, continue straight ahead and follow the road downhill to the B6160 running through the village. Starbotton is about three quarters of the way round your Great Whernside circular walk.

Turn left and walk along the road to the edge of the village, then turn right onto the bridleway signposted to Arncliffe, Kettlewell and Buckden. Follow it down to the River Wharfe and cross the footbridge. On the far bank, turn left onto the Dales Way, signposted to Kettlewell.

The Dales Way now carries you south through Wharfedale for around two miles, broadly following the River Wharfe downstream. This final stretch is straightforward and easy to follow, with yellow waymarker arrows along the way. The path eventually delivers you onto the B6160 in Kettlewell, where you turn left and cross the bridge over the Wharfe to return to the car park and finish your Great Whernside circular walk.

Great Whernside Circular Walk: Distance, Duration, Statistics

Recommended Ordnance Survey Map

The best map to use on this walk is the Ordnance Survey map of the Yorkshire Dales Northern & Central Area, reference OS Explorer OL30, scale 1:25,000. It clearly displays footpaths, rights of way, open access land and vegetation on the ground, making it ideal for walking, running and hiking. The map can be purchased from Amazon in either a standard, paper version or a weatherproof, laminated version, as shown below.

Yorkshire Dales Walking Guidebooks

Walking in the Yorkshire Dales: North and East, by Dennis Kelsall, describes 43 circular day walks of 3 to 12 miles across the Howgills, Mallerstang, Swaledale, Wensleydale, Coverdale and Nidderdale, with Ordnance Survey mapping and notes on parking and refreshments.

15 Short Walks in the Yorkshire Dales, by Jonathan and Lesley Williams, covers the area around Sedbergh, Kirkby Lonsdale and Ingleton. Its 15 routes of 1 to 7 miles each take under three hours, ideal for families or a relaxed half day out. Both books can be purchased from Amazon, as shown below.

About Starbotton

Starbotton is a small village on the floor of Upper Wharfedale, sitting beside the River Wharfe roughly midway between Kettlewell and Buckden. It has around sixty houses and fewer than fifty residents, with many of the properties now used as holiday accommodation and only two working farms remaining, one at either end of the village. Starbotton shares a civil parish with Kettlewell and lies within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Its position on the valley floor, two miles upstream of Kettlewell, makes it a natural stopping point three quarters of the way round the Great Whernside circular walk.

The origin of the name has been debated for a long time. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Stamphotne and in the twelfth century as Stauerboten, forms that suggest an Old English word replacing a Norse one and a meaning along the lines of the place where stakes are got. People have lived in this part of the dale since at least the Iron Age, and the surrounding hillsides are criss-crossed with packhorse trails from the days when Fountains Abbey, Jervaulx and Rievaulx traded wool and other goods across the Pennines.

The defining event in the village’s history came in June 1686, when a violent rainstorm sent a flash flood down the hillside and swept much of Starbotton away. Rebuilding had only recently begun, the earliest dated building being from 1621, and what survived was repaired while new houses went up through the closing years of the century. Nineteen years before the flood, in July 1667, Lady Anne Clifford broke her journey up the dale here, recording in her diary that she had spent the night at John Symondson’s house. The village was designated a conservation area in 1969.

Lead has left its mark too. A smelt flue climbs from the back of the village to a chimney above Cam Gill, and collecting the white lead oxide from inside it was work given to children, which helps explain the number of young burials in Kettlewell churchyard during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A small quarry beside the bridge over Cam Gill Beck supplied stone for many of the houses. Today the village has a pub, the Fox and Hounds, a Quaker burial ground restored as a Millennium Project, and the old Cam Road climbing away over the tops, now a green lane and the route by which the Great Whernside circular walk drops back into the dale.

Great Whernside Circular Walk: My Photos

My Great Whernside circular walk begins with a short stretch of road towards the village maypole, passing the Kettlewell war memorial on my left. The stone cross stands in a small garden enclosed by dry stone walls and remembers nine men of the village, six lost in the First World War and three in the Second. Today it is surrounded by scarecrows in service uniform, a nurse and a police officer among them.

At the crossroads I reach the maypole and turn left towards the King’s Head. The pole stands where the village green once was, and the spot is still known by that name even though the green itself has long gone. The present maypole was raised by the Women’s Institute in 1953 to mark the coronation of Elizabeth II, replacing an earlier one dated 1898.

Kettlewell is a pleasure to walk through at any time, and all the more so today with scarecrows at every turn. The Kettlewell Scarecrow Festival has run each August since 1994, when it began as a fundraiser for the village primary school. It now supports the school, the village hall and St Mary’s Church, and brings thousands of visitors to the village across its nine days.

Making my way slowly out of the village, I pass Langcliffe Garth, a quiet corner of stone cottages set behind a well-kept green. Bunting is strung across the grass and yet more scarecrows are posed on the lawn. It is easily the prettiest spot on this early village stretch of my Great Whernside circular walk.

From a stone bridge near Kettlewell Camping I join the footpath for Hag Dyke and the climbing begins in earnest. Away to my right lies the valley carved by Dowber Gill Beck, ground I covered only a few days ago on my Great Whernside walk, which reaches the same summit by a different line.

A glance back gives me the first proper view of the day, down over Kettlewell and out along the dale. Behind the village rises the rocky outcrop of Gate Cote Scar on the eastern flank of Middlesmoor Pasture, a band of limestone that draws climbers as well as walkers.

As I gain height the valley of Dowber Gill Beck opens out more fully on my right. The footpath running through it leads to Providence Pot, and from there Hag Dyke can also be reached, making it an alternative ascent from Kettlewell to Great Whernside. The initial steepness has eased by now and this is pleasant walking, still climbing steadily towards Hag Dyke.

After a mile of steady climbing the gate at Hag Dyke comes into view, its nameplate flanked by a signpost pointing back to Kettlewell and onward to Great Whernside. The name comes from Dales dialect, in which a dyke is a dividing wall on the fell and a hag is land taken in from the moor, so Hag Dyke is the wall separating the intake from open ground. The building beyond was a farmhouse long before it was anything else, with occupants traced back to 1730 and probably earlier still.

The hostel has been run by the Ben Rhydding Scout and Guide Group from Ilkley since 1947, when the building passed into their hands, and a team of volunteer wardens has looked after it ever since. It stands at 1,525 feet and was long reckoned to be the highest house in the old West Riding, reachable only on foot or by four-wheel drive. The farmhouse was rebuilt as a hostel in 1959 and 1960, and it may well have sheltered men working the Dowber Gill lead mines before that.

The path leads me along the right-hand side of the building, where a sign records both the 1947 date and the height above sea level, then through a gate and left around the rear. From here the climb proper begins, with the summit of Great Whernside the sole objective for the next stage of my Great Whernside circular walk.

A few minutes of climbing is enough to open up the view behind me, the hostel sitting below and the dale falling away towards Kettlewell. On the horizon to the south-west I can make out the silhouette of Pendle Hill, roughly twenty-four miles off as the crow flies.

Another mile of climbing brings me to the summit of Great Whernside, where the cairn and triangulation pillar stand among a jumble of gritstone boulders. At 704 metres this is the high point of my Great Whernside circular walk, and the rocks make the top feel considerably more dramatic than the long grassy approach suggests.

Great Whernside rises to 704 metres, or 2,310 feet, making it the highest point on the eastern side of Wharfedale above Kettlewell. It forms the watershed between Wharfedale and Nidderdale and sits on the boundary between the Yorkshire Dales National Park and the Nidderdale National Landscape. The River Nidd rises on its eastern slopes, above Angram Reservoir.

The name Whernside was first recorded in 1214 as Querneside and comes from Old English, combining a word for quern or millstone with one for hillside, so it means the hillside where millstones are found. The upper part of the fell is millstone grit and quarries once worked the Wharfedale side, while from Nidderdale the same hill was known as Blackfell. The word Great was added in 1771, apparently to set it apart from neighbouring Little Whernside.

Until 1997 there was no public right of way to the summit at all. Two footpaths were registered that year, one running up from Kettlewell and one along the summit ridge, and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 later opened up large parts of the fell as access land. Besides the Kettlewell approach, the hill can be climbed by a shorter route from Park Rash on the Coverdale road, or by a longer and quieter one from Scar House Reservoir.

Great Whernside should not be confused with Whernside, a separate fell some seventeen miles to the west, while Little Whernside lies two and a half miles to the north-east and divides Coverdale from Nidderdale. Tor Dike, on the north-western flank, is an earthwork of ditch and rampart cut into the limestone, thought to have been built either by Iron Age tribes facing the Roman advance or later in the Dark Ages. The fell has also been the scene of several aircraft crashes over the years.

Heading north along the footpath across the top of Great Whernside, I pass boulder after boulder and the views simply keep coming. Away to the west the Yorkshire Three Peaks stand in silhouette, Pen-y-ghent about ten miles off with Ingleborough and Whernside roughly sixteen. Picking out all three from up here is one of the real rewards of my Great Whernside circular walk.

The path eventually begins to drop off the mountainside and brings me to a dry stone wall and a stile at a spot called Black Dike Hole. The mountain ahead in the distance is Buckden Pike, and the descent runs across the moorland of Black Dike. This ground has a reputation for being notoriously boggy in wet weather, though it is usually passable with care, and today I am fortunate to find it dry.

Beyond the minor road I join a bridleway heading west around the head of a beautiful valley. The view runs across Diamond Hill and carries all the way down into Wharfedale.

The bridleway broadly follows the line of a dry stone wall on my left. Sometimes the path runs close alongside it and at other times it pulls away and climbs a little further up the hillside, but the wall stays in view for most of this stage of my Great Whernside circular walk.

Looking south from the bridleway, the valley opens out in fine style. Fears Gill Beck runs down through it and becomes Cam Gill Beck, which is joined by Park Gill Beck before flowing on through Kettlewell to meet the River Wharfe. Caseker Gill Beck feeds into Park Gill Beck further upstream, near Dow Cave.

From much the same spot, turning to look south-east, I can pick out the boulder-covered summit of Great Whernside. It also lays out the shape of the ridge I crossed earlier, running north from the top before dropping away towards Black Dike Hole.

The bridleway takes me across a delightful area called Sandy Gate. Looking west, the imposing hill on the far side is Birks Fell, although Ordnance Survey maps divide it into two, Firth Fell and Birks Fell, even though it reads as a single hill from here. Below it, still out of sight, lies the stretch of Wharfedale between Buckden and Starbotton that I will reach later on my Great Whernside circular walk.

As I lose height, glimpses open up of the valley away to the north-west. This is roughly the Buckden area, where Wharfedale meets Langstrothdale close to Hubberholme.

Starbotton Cam Road zigzags down the hillside and eventually the rooftops of Starbotton come into view, the village sitting on the floor of the Wharfedale valley with the slopes of Moor End Fell rising behind it. This marks about three quarters of the way round my Great Whernside circular walk, with the high ground now behind me.

The loose stony track I have been descending changes character as it nears the village, giving way to a concrete twin track. It drops steadily between dry stone walls with the roofs of Starbotton directly below.

I make my way between the stone houses and cottages of Starbotton, every one of them a pleasure to pass. The tarmac lane carries me gently downhill towards the B6160.

From the main road I turn onto the bridleway signposted to Arncliffe, Kettlewell and Buckden. It runs dead straight towards the River Wharfe, enclosed on both sides by dry stone walls and backed by Moor End Fell. This is where my Great Whernside circular walk leaves the hills behind for good.

A wooden footbridge carries me over the River Wharfe, its deck and railings resting on stout stone piers set in the riverbed. On the far bank I turn left onto the Dales Way public footpath, heading south through the Wharfedale valley.

The final two miles follow the Dales Way, a flat and easy-going public footpath that broadly traces the River Wharfe downstream. After the climb to the summit and the crossing of the moor, it is a gentle way to see out my Great Whernside circular walk.

I have followed this path on many occasions and the river is never quite the same twice. Today the Wharfe is low and still, its surface patched with weed and holding the reflections of the bankside trees. Beyond the meadows, walled pasture climbs towards the pale limestone slopes on the far side of the dale.

A barn I recognise from previous walks tells me Kettlewell is not far off now. Looking slightly to the left, I can pick out the village school among the trees, a small primary that serves Upper Wharfedale as part of the Upper Wharfedale Primary Federation.

Back in Kettlewell I drop down to the riverbank for a closer look at the bridge carrying the B6160 over the Wharfe. The village is busy at the best of times, and the Scarecrow Festival has made it busier still, with families spread along the shingle and the shallows. It is a fine scene to finish my Great Whernside circular walk on.