Hardraw Force

Hardraw Force falls from a limestone lip into Hardraw Scar, a wooded ravine at the hamlet of Hardraw, about 1.5km north of Hawes and a short step off the line of the Pennine Way. The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority calls it the highest single drop waterfall in England on its own place page, and hedges the claim in a June 2026 Royal Mail stamp release: reputedly the highest single-drop, above-ground waterfall in England, plummeting more than 30 metres. The qualifier matters, because yorkshire-dales.com points out that the underground falls at Gaping Gill, on Ingleborough, are taller.

The park authority records that the grounds are owned by the Green Dragon Inn, and the way in is through the inn, past its Heritage Centre and across a turnstile, for a charge that this page does not quote. Mark Thompson of the Hardraw Force Heritage Centre told that release the centre has been custodian of the Force for 25 years, with about 20,000 visitors annually. The reward for paying is the amphitheatre below the fall, where a stone bandstand hosts the Hardraw Scar Brass Band contest; thedales.org.uk dates the first contest to 1884, a lapse after 1927 and a revival in 1976. William Wordsworth, visiting in 1799, called the recess behind the water “lofty and magnificent”, and Tate’s catalogue dates J.M.W. Turner’s sketches of the fall to 28 July 1816, from which he worked up the watercolour engraved for Whitaker’s history of Richmondshire.

The overhang that Wordsworth admired is the hazard. The park authority warns visitors not to walk behind the veil of water because the overhang is precarious, and its release says softer rocks eroding beneath the limestone lip made it; Wikipedia gives the sequence as a shale bed under sandstone, capped by carboniferous limestone.

The gps-routes.co.uk description of the walk to the fall, through woodland beside Hardraw Beck, comes to about 1km there and back. That makes the visit a fit for a rest day between hill days, or for the morning before Great Shunner Fell, which the Pennine Way climbs from Hardraw, though it does not suit anyone who objects to paying to cross private land, or who wants height and open ground in the same outing. For the other great waterfall of Wensleydale, Aysgarth Falls is a staircase of limestone tiers on the River Ure, which the park authority attributes to differential erosion, rather than a single drop.