Limestone pavement: grikes, care and slow steps
Limestone pavement is a slow, fragile surface. Grikes, wet rock and rare plants all ask you to stay with the worn line.
Limestone pavement looks, from a distance, like a tidy courtyard dropped onto a hill: flat blocks, pale in sun, split by dark cracks. Close to, it is a maze. The blocks are called clints. The cracks are grikes. Between them live ferns and small plants that have found a sheltered garden in an otherwise bare place. It is one of the most distinctive surfaces a walker meets in Britain, and one of the easiest to damage with a careless stride.
How the surface came to be
The pavement is the top of a limestone bed, scraped and then dissolved. Rain, which is slightly acidic, widens the joints over a very long time. The result is a pattern of slabs and slots that can cover a hillside or only a few metres beside a path. You do not need the geology degree. You need to see that the pattern is old and slow, and that a boot in the wrong slot undoes more than it seems.
Many of these places are valued precisely because they are uncommon. Signs, and sometimes fences with a proper gate, exist for that reason. If a notice asks you to keep to a marked route, that route is the walk. The wider courtesy is the same one set out in the Countryside Code: leave the habitat as you found it, only more carefully than you would leave a grass field.
Where to put your feet
Walk the worn line. The pale, polished clints that already show feet are the path. Grikes are not a shortcut and not a place to pose with a leg hidden, however comic the photograph. A grike can be deeper than it looks, narrow enough to wedge a boot, and lined with plants that will not appreciate the company. Ankle injuries on this ground are ordinary. So is the quieter damage of crushed ferns.
Wet limestone is slick, especially where it has been polished by years of soles. Shorten your step, keep your weight over your feet, and use a pole if you like poles, planted on rock rather than into a vegetated crack. In frost, treat the whole pavement as a place to walk around if a grass alternative exists.
Plants, pockets and the wish to collect
The interest is in the grikes: shade, a little soil, plants that would fry on the open clint. Looking is the visit. Hands, sticks and souvenir stones are how a living crack becomes a empty one. Leaving no trace applies with extra force on a surface that grows so slowly. If you want a record, take a photograph from the path and leave the arrangement as you found it.
Sheep and rabbits use this ground too. Their paths are not always your paths. A trod that ducks under a scar or into a dense patch of pavement may be taking you off the right of way and onto the fragile bit. When the worn human line and the animal line part, stay with the human one if it matches the map.
Weather and the wider hill
Pavement often sits on shoulders and tops, open to wind, with the view arriving all at once. It can be the highlight of a dale walk and also the place where a shower makes progress suddenly slow. Build that slowness into the day. A kilometre of careful rock is not a kilometre of turf. If cloud drops, the pale pattern can become a confusing set of identical slabs. A bearing to the wall or the stile at the far side, practised in the way a compass is used in poor visibility, matters more than it does on a fenced lane.
Combine the pavement with a grass descent you have already identified. Staying among the clints until you are tired is how people twist an ankle on the last, careless gap.
A pace that suits the place
This is ground for a short attention span in the best sense. You look down, then up, then down again. The view can wait ten seconds. A party that spreads out across the pavement to chat will cover more fragile ground than a party that stays in file. Single file on the worn line feels fussy. It is the right fuss.
Afterwards, check the soles of your boots for lodged stones and the odd living scrap. Put the scrap back if you can do it from the path. The hill has enough gaps without taking a fern home in a tread.
Frequently asked questions
May I explore between the blocks if I am careful?
The careful act is to stay on the worn route. Exploring the grikes, even gently, crushes the plants that make the pavement worth protecting.
Is limestone pavement only found in the Yorkshire Dales?
The Dales hold famous examples, and similar rock appears in other limestone country too. Wherever you meet it, the same feet-on-the-worn-line rule holds.
Are poles a good idea?
They help balance on wet clints if you plant them on bare rock. They are a nuisance if they spear into vegetated cracks. Used with that limit, they suit many walkers.