Wending its way around some of the highest peaks in the Pennines, the Settle-Carlisle Railway is among the greatest engineering feats of the Victorian age, and arguably England’s most scenic line. This year, it is celebrating its 150th anniversary, said Duncan Craig in the Financial Times – a good moment, I felt, for a week-long break travelling up and down it to explore some of the “extraordinary” hiking country it opens up, much of it in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Some of the buildings at its stations have recently been converted into holiday lets, and we stayed in one – the booking office at Kirkby Stephen. Painted in the “crimson-and-cream” livery of the old Midland Railway company, it is charming, cosy, and, of course, perfectly located for hopping on and off the trains. This is “the railway line that shouldn’t have been made”, so “fiercely undulating” is the terrain it traverses for much of its 73-mile length.
The Midland Railway company wanted a share of the “fast-expanding” London to Scotland rail market, and won Parliament’s approval for the line in 1866, as its rival, the London and North Western Railway, refused to share its tracks (now the West Coast Mainline). Built of local stone, the railway’s great viaducts are as grand as cathedrals, and seem to rise naturally from their landscape.
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But, in fact, they came at great cost. Several thousand navvies worked on the railway, living in makeshift camps, and many died in accidents, or from exposure and disease in the bitterly cold winters. The journey south from Kirkby Stephen takes you past three majestic hills – Pen-y-ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside – to the “engineering crux and spiritual core” of the railway, the Ribblehead Viaduct, with its 24 soaring arches.
There’s also particularly good hiking around Dent, the highest station in England at 350 metres. A holiday cottage today, the lone building there has a picture window overlooking Dentdale – one of the country’s finest views.