The Yorkshire dales stretch from the foot of Ingleborough north-east and west, over a considerable space of country. It is a wild, and, in many parts, a dreary region. Long ridges of hills covered with black heath, or bare stone,--with stony wastes at their feet of the grimmest and most time-worn character. All round Ingleborough the whole country seems to have been so tossed, shaken, and undermined by the violence which at some period broke it up into its present character, that its whole subterranean space seems to be filled with caves and passages for winds and waters that possess a remarkable connexion one with another, and present a multitude of singular phenomena. On the Craven side lie those celebrated spots Malham Cove and Gordale Scar, well known to tourists; the one, a splendid range of precipice with a river issuing from its base; the other, Gordale Scar, one of the most solemnly impressive of nature’s works. It is the course of a river which has torn its way from the top of a mountain, through a rugged descent in the solid rock, and falls into a sort of cove surrounded by lofty precipices, which make such a gloom, that on looking up, the stars are said sometimes to be seen at noon. Amongst all the magnificent scenes which the mountainous parts of these kingdoms present, I never visited one which impressed me with so much awe and wonder as this. You approach it by no regular road; you have even to ask permission to pass through the yard of a farm-house, to get at it; and your way is then up a valley, along which come two or three streams, running on with a wild beauty and abundance that occupy and delight your attention. Suddenly, you pass round a rock, and find yourself in this solemn cove, the high grey cliffs towering above you on all sides, the water dropping from their summits in a silver rain, and before you a river descending from a cleft in the mountain, and falling, as it were, over a screen, and spreading in white foam over it in a solemn and yet riotous beauty. This screen is formed of the calcareous deposit of the water; and crossing the stream by the stones which lie in it, you may mount from the greensward which carpets the bottom of the cove, climb up this screen, and ascend along the side of the falling torrent, up one of the most wild and desolate ravines, till you issue on the mountain top, where the mountain cistus and the crimson geranium wave their lovely flowers in the breeze.