Malham
“And the peace which I always found in the silence and emptiness of the moors filled me utterly.”
Grassington
The 2020 remake of All Creatures Great and Small featured the small Yorkshire Dales town of Grassington as the fictional village of Darrowby.
Join us on a quick video tour of Grassington: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x7bW0O-44w
With a small central market square surrounded by period stone buildings and original cobbled streets, Grassington provides a perfectly charmingly setting.
The square with its old, green well hand pump.
As James walks into Darrowby for the first time, we see this building—done up as C.A. Handly Booksellers—as the backdrop.
This building on the corner of the square, acts as the exterior of Skeldale House (Siegfried’s surgery).
On the show, a portico extended from the doorway and they added a second set of doors.
The surgery in the background with the grocery store on the left.
The surgery’s front door.
Callum Woodhouse is brilliant as Tristan Farnon and, of course, we loved him as Leslie Durrell in The Durrells in Corfu.
This door is unmarked in the show (below), but it’s actually a café that connects with the bookstore next door (the grocery store in the show).
It’s a little hard to tell with the awning, but this bookstore plays the part of G.F. Endleby grocery store in the show.
The Drover’s Arms is a real pub and they retain the same name in the show. The more modern features of the exterior are played down.
The interior of the Drovee’s Arms in Grassington is too modern for the show, so the interior shots were filmed in another location.
The interior of the Drover’s Arms was filmed at the Green Dragon Inn in the tiny hamlet of Hardraw. Sadly, when we looked up the Inn online, the website said they had fallen on hard financial times and were temporarily closed. Here is an interior shot of the Green Dragon pub—what a building!
This chocolate shop was the Harrowby Ironmongers.
The post office was converted into a sundries shop.
Grassington has, as one would expect, capitalized on their new-found fame as the fictional Darrowby. Here are some fun examples:
Not really All Creatures Great and Small related, but still funny. 😆
Our favorite 🤩
River Wharfe
After leaving Grassington we noticed a lot of people walking down the small hill toward the River Wharfe. We decided to take a quick look and see what everyone was on about.
Everywhere you look, the Dales serve up postcard views.
Despite the lack of recent rains and the resulting low river volumes, the vista still retains its beauty. Being from California we take for granted that water will still flow from melting snow for months after winter ends. In the UK, without consistent rain, rivers quickly start running dry.
I love the simplicity of the old-school hand-turned wheel, which moves gears to raise and lower a wooden spillway gate.
The Linton Falls Weir was built to create a hydroelectric generating power station. The station was first opened in 1909, but had closed by 1948.
Basically, when the sun comes out in England, so too the people. Everyone was making their way down to the river to picnic, swim, paddle board, and soak in the sun.
Malham Cove
There are three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire known as North Riding, East Riding, and West Riding. Each riding even has its own flag.
The “fingerpost” with grid reference above indicates you are in the town of Malham in the West Riding (WR).
From 1964, many fingerposts were replaced by ones in the modern style, but some of the old style (like the one above) still survive.
As another example, the fingerpost for Rievaulx Abbey on our previous post indicated we were in the North Riding.
Malham fingerpost in the West Riding (WR)
About 15,000 years ago, Yorkshire was covered with ice sheets and glaciers. The ice swept down from the north scouring and modifying the landscape.
Malham Cove is a huge curving amphitheater shaped cliff formation of limestone rock. The vertical face of the cliff is about 260 feet high.
Once upon a time, a huge waterfall poured over the top as a massive glacier melted on the high land above it. Since then, freezing water and rain have continued the process of creating the sheer limestone cliff face we see today.
In December 2015, heavy rains from Storm Desmond caused Malham Cove to briefly come back to life for the first time in hundreds of years. When it flows, Malham Cove is England’s highest unbroken waterfall.
A moderately difficult set of steps leads up the left side of the Cove to the plateau above.
The top of Malham Cove is capped by a large area of “limestone pavement.”
Back when the glacial ice had scoured away all the soil, the underlying limestone was directly exposed to the elements.
Soils do not form easily on soluble limestone and, due to the chemical properties of limestone (calcium carbonate), rainwater readily dissolves the rock.
Here is our video tour to see what it looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od5n5NyuODg
Karst is a topography formed from the dissolution of soluble carbonate rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum.
Fractures opened up by the dissolving rock produce a distinctive “limestone pavement” consisting of ubiquitous gyres (fissures) and clints (blocks).
In the film Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1, Harry & Hermione set up camp in a tent on the “limestone pavement” at the top of Malham Cove. You can watch the clip filmed at Malham Cove here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD4lCzFMiV8
English Verdure
The dry stack stone walls dissect the countryside, a crucial component of the quintessentially English landscape.
Puffy clouds in baby-blue skies, rolling green hills littered with meandering stone walls, an old stone barn, a public footpath shared with free-range livestock—must be in England!
