It may feel like the bitter, blustery weather of recent weeks has kept spring in suspension, but nature won’t be held back by a bit of dreichness.
In the sun-trapping sliver of woodland surrounding Janet’s Foss, a tufa-topped waterfall that wouldn’t look out of place in a South East Asian jungle, there were countless green shoots of recovery.
These leaves of wild garlic, or ramsons, were signs of slow-boiling spring; not quite at their flowering best when they will swathe the dell in reefs of white and clouds of odour. Even so, when I ground a bit of leaf between my fingers, that sharp, sulphuric smell was already there, waiting to fill the wood in a month or so like an unbottled spirit.
Inevitably, in the sheep-shorn landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, colour-carpeted woodlands are novelties rather than the norm, but there is a tantalising clue to a different past. One theory holds that Craven, the historic name for this district, derives from craf, Welsh for garlic. Did the Britons know a “land of wild garlic”, where ramsons bloomed so abundantly in the forests they named the whole place after them?
This corner of Craven is truly spoiled for wonder; as well as wildflower woodlands, it hosts not just one magnificent freak of limestone geology but two, with radically different personalities.
The upside-down amphitheatre of Malham Cove is a silent sweep of elegant grandeur, but Gordale Scar is a catastrophe in motion, a torrent of water boring its deafening way through the wreckage lining an ominously overhung canyon. Onlookers gasped audibly as we clambered past them to scramble up the Scar’s baroque central spectacle, a polished pillar of tufa flanked by waterfalls, but, in truth, it’s easier than it looks, even with wind-whipped water lashing you on the way.
The sun is warm when it emerges, and the tang of wild garlic is back in the world – despite appearances, spring has arrived in Yorkshire.
