The Coast-to-Coast Walk: Rocks & Scenery

The Coast to-Coast Walk from St Bees to Robin Hoods Bay, journeys through rocks and scenery shaped during the last 500 million years in many different environments. Its a story of tropical seas and coastal plains, landslides and deserts, glaciers and exploding volcanoes, enlivened by climate change, and by continental collisions and mountain building on a Himalayan scale. Take this book with you as a guide. In plains language and with over 300 original drawings, Barry Butler and John Gunner will show you how Britain's remarkable journey in space and time has left its mark on the rocks and scenery. Your experience of the walk will be greatly enriched by a deeper understanding of the landscape of Northern England.

The rocks beneath a new tribute to Alfred Wainwright. A new guidebook to Wainwright s famous walk across northern England offers a intriguing insight into what make the Yorkshire Dales as a National Park so very special. The Coast to Coast Walk: Rocks and Scenery, published by 2QT of Settle, attempts not to replace Wainwright s guide to one of Britain s most famous and popular long-distance walks, but to help readers see the route in a different way, and in so doing give insight into what we mean by Natural Beauty in the landscape.

The Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson once wrote:

To look at the scenery without trying to understand the rock is like listening to poetry in an unknown language. You hear the beauty but you miss the meaning.

Starting from St Bees Head on the Cumbrian Coast, the book follows Wainwright s route in meticulous detail, but focuses, not like most guidebooks on general history and views, but on a specific story that of the creation of the landscape itself through the often hugely complex, epic process of change, which in the case of the Coast to Coast Walk covers an awe-inspiring 300 million years or so earth s history, a timescale so vast that it is difficult for the human mind to comprehend.

The descriptive text divides the Coast to Coast Walk into six sections, each with its own, very contrasting landscape the West Coast, The Lake District, Ravenstonedale, the Yorkshire Dales, the Vale of Mowbray and the North York Moors. Broadly speaking, and except for the area around St. Bees, this cross section of England through three National Parks, starts with the most ancient, Ordovician rocks of the Lake District, continues across later Carboniferous rocks that dominate the Yorkshire Dales, then over the more relatively recent Permian, Triassic rocks hidden beneath boulder clay in the Vale of Mowbray, and finally across the newer Jurassic rocks of the North York Moors National Park.

It is all about process. Each section of the book should be read in sequence to understand the picture as it unfolds a whole; terms such as bedrock and superficial rocks, bedding planes and cleavage are introduced and explained, as well as such core distinctions between Sedimentary rocks and Volcanic rocks. Each of these reflect a wide variety of different processes of change, added to which is the epic story of drifting continents and resulting epoch-changing continental collisions, which have created the British mountains ridges we see today, even in their much eroded and weathered forms. There is also the huge, sometimes relatively recent, often even continuing, process of glaciation, desertification, river and weather erosion.

Each Section of the book also has a Journal or summary description, handily in blue type to contrast against the detailed interpretations of specific landscape sections or features.

Though the book can be used as a brilliant field guide to much of the basic geological structures of all three National Parks traversed by the Coast to Coast Walk, inevitably the third and fourth sections, Ravenstonedale (now in the recently extended area of the Yorkshire Dales National Park) and The Yorkshire Dales will be of special interest to people with an interest in the Yorkshire Dales, dealing as it does with the sections of the route through the National Park from Shap through the Orton Fells and Smardale to Kirkby Stephen, Nine Standards, Keld, Swaledale (with excellent insight into the lead mining) to Reeth and Richmond. There are brief descriptions of the distinctive features of Carboniferous rocks, of Great Scar and Main Limestones, and the Yoredale Cycle. explaining why Dales summits such as Ingleborough have their distinctive stepped shapes.

--Colin Speakman