As has become a tradition, we go away for my birthday. It started when I turned 30, when everyone chipped in and we went to the Isle of Skye for 5 days. Last year we went to Malham in the Yorkshire Dales.

 

This year we went back to the Yorkshire Dales, but we went to Ingleton instead.
Ingleton has (a lot of other things I’m sure) a waterfall trail, and a cave system.

Even though I’d chosen it as my place to go, I didn’t really expect it to be much; there were no good pictures of the waterfall trail or caves online when I had a quick search, so my expectations were pretty low.

The week before we set off I printed out the Waterfall Trail leaflet, and was surprised when it said the walk was 2 1/2 – 4 hours.

The weather forecast looked so poor on the run up that we considered moving the booking to the weekend after, but my gut said stay with this weekend, so we did.

We drove up on Saturday morning, and as predicted, it was chucking it down with rain. By the time we got to the waterfall car park (it’s about a two hour drive). So with fingers crossed we set off on the circular walk.

It was a fair walk before we saw the first waterfall, but it was a lot bigger an more impressive than I was expecting it to be.

There was a clear path all the way around, and a places there were bridges built into the walk, so we walked right in front of the waterfalls in places.

As well as walking around the river/waterfalls there were also chunks of the walk where we were in the hills. It was a bit misty, which I love. I love winter time; the grass is an odd yellow colour and the trees are bare, and add in a bit of mist and it is just perfect.

The walk has a lot of stairs in it, and most of the walk was on rocks so it was uneven. Even though it was advertised as strenuous and we scoffed at it, it was more steps and walking than either of us expected.

Having said that we made it around in 3 hours, even with various photo stops and drone flying stops.

At points it was far too windy to fly my drone, and at other points there were a lot of trees and I didn’t feel too confident flying it.

One of the waterfalls was in an open spot with some benches which was ideal for flying my drone, as it was also surround by hills.

Once we had completed the walk we checked into the hotel and had tea. We were both tired so we went to bed really early. We’d been up since 730.

In hindsight, I probably should have popped out to see the viaduct before tea…