One of the most iconic landmarks in the Yorkshire Dales is Kilnsey Crag. Located in Wharfedale between Grassington and Kettlewell, it is a regular feature on Yorkshire Dales calendars and I often pass the site on my All Creatures Great & Small tours.
Kilnsey Crag as its name suggests is a huge limestone crag or cliff running next to the B6160 road. The Crag is actually 170ft high with a 40ft overhang.
It has become a popular site with climbers and is classed by RockFax as being one Yorkshire’s Big 3 Limestone climbing cliffs (along with Malham Cove and Gordale). Due to its difficult overhangs it has a reputation with high grade sport’s climbers with routes up with names such as Dominatrix, Frankie comes to Kilnsey and Let them eat jellybeans. Funnily enough the more traditional climbing routes have more sensible names like Diedrie!
Two other high grade routes North Star and Northern Lights are recognised as two of Britain’s most extreme climbing routes.
It’s not just climbers, but fell runners that have a strong association to Kilnsey Crag with a regular fell race, known for one of the more tricky ascents and descents in the Dales. Runners race to be first up the near vertical, short sharp climb to the top of the crag. The race is only 1.6km and always takes place as part of the annual Kilnsey Show in September.
The race first took place in 1897 and is always won in a time of less than 10 minutes.
“The Kilnsey Crag Race is iconic because of the crowds. There’s not many races where the crowd are on top of you like that. Back in the 1970s and 1980s there were crowds of 18 – 20 thousand – so it was really inspirational! I ended up running for England and Great Britain 27 times and it all started with Kilnsey Crag Race – it did seriously…”
Michael Hawkins, Kilnsey Crag Race record holder
In addition to the crag being the backdrop to the annual Kilnsey Show, the cliff has been painted and sketched many times by artists but probably most famously in 1816 by the water colour artist JMW Turner on one of his many trips to Yorkshire to visit his friend Walter Fawkes at Farnley Hall just outside Otley.
The cliff is made of limestone, formed c360-320 million years ago under shallow warm tropical seas. Small marine creatures died and they dropped to the ocean floor, the calcium in their shells gradually compressing to form the sedimentary rock. This happened during a period known as the Carboniferous.
But Kilnsey Crag owes its existence to more recent times during various ice ages where freezing caused the natural bedded rocks to crack. Eventually as glaciers formed, in this instance during the last ice age, the huge Wharfedale Glacier, moved down the river valley plucking out the blocks and generally carving out the U shaped valley and cliff face we see today. Where Kilnsey is there was more coral in the area and the limestone where the cliff face is, is harder than the surrounding rock and hence being carved as more of a sheer cliff.
With regards to the history of ownership of the crag, before the Norman conquest the lands were recorded as being owned by a man called Ulf. But soon after William the Conquerors invasion, the lands around Kilnsey eventually were donated to the monks at Fountains Abbey by Alice de Romille who owned Skipton Castle.
The monks would drive their sheep to summer pasture along a drovers road known as Mastilles Lane. This walled track close to Kilnsey is popular with walkers these days but was once a Roman marching route to a marching fort up near Malham Tarn.
After the dissolution of the monasteries, the land and the crag came were bought back of the crown, first by the Gresham family and then in 1572, the Tennant family – where the pub The Tennant Arms sitting next to the crag gets its name from.
In 1911 it came under the ownership of the Roberts family. Bertram Roberts the son of Sir James Roberts the then owner of Salts Mill bought the estate. The family have developed the estate with the addition of holiday lets, a trout farm, pony trekking , fishing lakes, a smokehouse and a café.
The estate is now run by Jamie Roberts and his wife Amy. His father, a dairy farmer started the estate’s diversification and dug out the fish ponds and lakes in the 1970’s, but Jamie and Amy are constantly evolving the 2000 acre estates interests. The latest project being growing plants and vegetables vertically in large containers using the fish sludge from the trout farm!
But back in 2023, the renowned Kilnsey Crag itself came up for sale in what was described in the particulars as “a totally unique opportunity”. Jamie and Amy put just the crag on the market along with 18.76 acres of agricultural land with offers sought of around £150,000 to help fund other work on the estate.
The site has a unique ecology, being known as calcareous grassland and is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for its range of flora and fauna as well as its unique biodiversity.
Jamie explained “We recognise in order to keep farming and keep supporting this fantastic landscape we live in we’ve got to keep changing and innovating in order that we’re going to be here at least a few more generations to keep managing the land and this amazing place at Kilnsey,”.
The land was bought by a local farming family who now work closely with the British Mountaineering Council to ensure access for climbers to the site.
This change of ownership won’t change anything for Kilnsey Crag for visitors to the area. It was created by glaciers about 12,000 years ago and I am sure it will be there for tourists to see in another 12,000!
As a final sign off to this blog, Kilnsey Crag was famous in the 1700’s for having its own witch, known as Old Nan. A bit like Mother Shipton she wasn’t a real witch but was known for her fortune telling and used to go to Skipton market to sell medicinal herbs. Her real name was Nancy Winter and she used to sleep in the old Kilnsey Hall. A grotto is sometimes created in Kilnsey at Halloween with a real life fortune telling witch and her helper – a small pet guinea pig!
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