Having read Jim Hutchinson’s excellent report on a similar trip, Mill Gill Force and Ballowfield’s Nature Reserve, a small group of us met in Askrigg village centre opposite Skelldale House used in the earlier television series of All Creatures Great and Small.
Lesley Collins was our excellent and very knowledgable leader taking us past the Old Mill, first a Corn Mill, used to make hay-rakes and lastly used to produce Hydro Electric Power for Askrigg but sadly no longer in use, just various remnants of leat, pond and buildings.
In the gill below, the bedrock was the Gayle Limestone, one of the lower bands in the Yoredale series of rocks known as Cyclothems, layers of limestone shale and sandstone which then repeat as shallow seas encroach the land followed by mud deposits from river deltas and finally sandstone, larger grains deposited on the top.
As we walked up hill through the woods we could gradually hear the waterfall, not a torrent but quite a spectacle after the rain following the very hot spell. Here could be seen the sandstone layer gradually giving way to another limestone this time the Hardraw.
Bedrock Gayle limestone with higher Yoredale rocks above of shales and mudstones.
Churt filled fossil
Top of Disher Force
After lunch at Ballowfields Nature Reserve, once the site of a holiday camp for people from the East Coast, we looked at the Wet Groove spoil heaps from earlier lead mining in the area. Climbing up the side of Eller Beck and Disher Force we were able to find fossils of coral, brachiopods and some chert in the Middle Limestone, now above Hardraw and Simonstone Limestones.
Climbing higher we looked at the Eller Beck Hushes, water had been collected above the highest local limestone, the Undersett, then flushed/hushed down over the rocks to clear the surface and expose the mineral veins in the bedrock. We were also able to make out a geological feature known as the Carbeby Basin.
Eller Beck Hushes, water was collected above then suddenly released to wash off the surface debris and reveal the mineral veins.
Below Ivy Scar further east along Ox Close, a grand bridleway from Bolton Castle to Askrigg and beyond, is the Knott, now a honeycomb of old lead workings. Here we were able to look among the spoil heaps for examples of Barytes, Fluorite, Calcite, and Galena with varying levels of success.
Ivy Scar, Undersett Limestone, the highest local limestone layer, and The Knott below – a Landslip?
The old Mine workings in the Knott
We returned to the cars by the same route with an excellent appreciation of our local landscape and the people who had worked and understood it in the past, with many thanks to Lesley for her guidance and explanations.
Report Josephine Drake
Photos Ian Hughes.