Ingleborough: Landscape and history

INGLEBOROUGH is the most iconic of the Three Peaks, probably the best known and most recognisable hill in the Yorkshire Dales. For more than two centuries, it has been a magnet for visitors, who have come to marvel at its majestic profile, to scale its challenging slopes, or to explore the enigmatic remains of the ‘hillfort’ on its summit. Turner, Ruskin, Southey and Wordsworth all captured it in paint or in words. Aristocratic travellers felt obliged to include the mountain and its caves in their itineraries. And for millennia Ingleborough has helped provide for those who lived around it – with peat for domestic fuel, stone for building and lime-burning, and pasture for sheep and cattle. In the distant past it acted as a place for communal gatherings and ritual. This beautiful new edition explores Ingleborough and its immediate surroundings in all its varied aspects, to create what is in essence the biography of a mountain. The author – a long-time Ingleborough enthusiast and scholar – describes how people and landscape have interacted over the centuries in an accessible, readable manner which will appeal to visitors and local people alike.