North Yorkshire

Most caves in North Yorkshire are located in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. This highland area is well known from the books and the BBC TV series All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot.

The village of Clapham is an excellent base for exploring the Ingleborough area. Its scenery of woods, fields, and moors has been shaped over 200 years by the Farrer family. The limestone scenery has a special beauty. In the surrounding countryside there are limestone gorges, beautiful Dales scenery and deep daylight shafts such as Gaping Ghyll, where Fell Beck goes underground on its way to Ingleborough Cave.

The area around Ingleton is rather interesting for geologists: the Craven Fault crosses the area. There are many geological sites to visit:

Limestone pavements: Limestone Pavements are found around Wharfedale, to the north of Malham and around Ingleborough. They have taken shape over the 12,000 years since the end of the most recent Ice Age. Many were formed by glaciers scraping the land down to bare limestone which has since been attacked by rainwater to produce a network of blocks (clints) and crevices (grikes).
Limestone grassland: The close-cropped billiard table turf of calcareous grassland contains a surprising variety of limeloving grasses and herbs.

North Yorkshire was originally the farmland around the city of York, but since 2024 the county and the city are united in the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority. We stick to the shorter name, and actually it makes no difference as we have no underground sites listed in the city. The city has numerous underground sites, the oldest from Roman times, but they are not open to tourists.