Upland dales

Nestling beneath the windswept moors, the dales are an essential part of the character of the National Park.

Most farming is traditional cattle and sheep rearing with a few dairy farms. Many of the farms have rights to graze sheep on the moor and have two separate flocks of sheep, one that spends most of the time out on the moor and the other that is kept in the richer, enclosed grass pastures all the time.

The fields are generally smaller and more irregularly shaped fields than the Tabular and Hambleton Hills. Drystone walls typically enclose the upper fields, often giving way to hedges on the lower groung. On the dalesides are clusters of solid sandstone farm buildings with red pantile roofs.

The dales contain a wonderful mosaic of habitats from valley bottom to moor top. Streams, or becks as they are known locally, in the valley bottoms, meadows cut for winter feed, summer grazing pastures, steep sided ghylls, larger moor-edge fields or intakes with rough grassland and native oak woodland.