Hoffman Kiln and Stainforth Force - 14/09/2015

Today me and my good friend Richard decided to travel up to the Yorkshire Dales to do a warm up walk before our Yorkshire Three Peaks the following day. We parked the car in Settle and headed anti-clockwise towards Langcliffe. He'd told me about an old kiln which he wanted to show me so we based today's walk around that. The first part of our walk to Langcliffe was a slight ascent up a stone path which had good views down to Settle. After reaching Langcliffe we then followed a path along the Ribblehead railway for a mile or so, before eventually reaching the entrance to the Hoffman Kiln. This industrial scale lime kiln was built in 1873 for the Craven Lime Company. The version built under licence at Langcliffe had 22 individual burning chambers.

I couldn't believe my eyes when we stepped inside because of the size of it. I highly recommend a visit to this spectacular place if you're in the area.

After spending quite a bit of time here, we carried on towards Stainforth, where we crossed the bridge to Stainforth Force.

We stopped for a coffee and a bite to eat and as we sat admiring the falls, Richard started getting excited over something he'd seen which I'd clearly missed. He'd witnessed a huge salmon leaping over the falls, so I then got up to have a look for myself. After a good few minutes we both witnessed it again, so out came the cameras in the hope of getting some photos or videos. I'd decided that the best option with my compact camera would be to video it, so Richard set his little tripod up so we could leave it filming. We came to the conclusion that there were only a couple of salmon in there as there were a good 10 minutes between each leap. It's also a few weeks too early yet because I've heard that the best time to see them is the end of October, so I think I'll be planning another trip up here in another month or so.

After spending about 45 minutes here, we carried on along the path where we followed the River Ribble down towards a large wier.

Moving on from the wier we passed through the grounds of a paper mill where we got some strange looks from a couple of forklift truck drivers. They mustn't be used to seeing people walk through there very often.  Eventually, we made it back to the main road where we saw a large mill shop which sold outdoor gear as well as other goodies, so we decided to go in and have a look around. This was a nice little amble and the highlight of the day was definitely the Hoffman Kiln.

7 miles and 750 feet of ascent