National Park Authorities all make a great fuss about how they want the parks to be "sustainable" and about how they want to encourage more visitors without swamping the area with cars, The trouble is they do very little about it and the Yorkshire Dales National Park is no exception.
There are very few alternatives to visiting the Park other than by car. The small and scattered resident population and the great distances between what are actually quite small urban centres mean that there are very few commercial opportunities for bus companies, whilst local councils now have no funding to buy in extra buses to meet the needs of visitors. The situation is at its worst on Sundays, when visitor numbers are highest, but public transport services are scarce.
What buses there are in the Yorkshire Dales on Sundays are only there because of the actions of ordinary people - hikers and the like - who have banded together to set up a Community Interest Company to raise funds to pay bus companies to provide the services that they can see are needed to allow people to visit the parks without recourse to a car. Over the years they've set up quite a network:
Since becoming Chair of our local Bus Users' Group I've helped to develop close working relationships with Dales Bus and we've held a number of joint promotional events in Lancaster. So when they wanted volunteers to help conduct a passenger survey I was at the front of the queue.
It wasn't an onerous task. I just had to ride on the bus, hand out survey forms to the passengers for them to complete during the day and then collect them on the way home. I surveyed the "Northern Dalesman" service 830 that runs from Preston (Lancashire) to Richmond (Yorkshire) and then continues as service 859 to Leyburn as shown on the map above. I didn't even have to go to Preston to get the bus as it stops at the end of our road on its way in to Lancaster.
It was a long day, but even longer for the driver who would have left the depot not long after 8.00am and who wouldn't get back there until almost 8.30pm that night, but every mile was a delight. With already half-a-dozen passengers on from Preston we picked up a few more in Lancaster and the villages in the Lune Valley on the way up to the start of the national park at Ingleton. From there it was up into the hills all the way to Ribblehead, where we were due to connect with a train from Leeds on the famous Settle & Carlisle Line. Northern Trains have been having some problems recently and Sunday was no exception with our train reported as running 30 minutes late.
Not that it was exactly straightforward to find that out. Ribblehead is an unstaffed station with no passenger information screens. It also has no mobile phone or internet signal. Fortunately, on a Sunday at least, there are National Park volunteers on duty who have access to a land-line in one of the station buildings and who can therefore be contacted by regular passengers on the train who know the number, to advise them of any delays and to ask for the bus to be held.
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Ribblehead, with the famous viaduct in the distance. There are worse places to wait for a delayed train.
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But the driver was put in a bit of a dilemma. Waiting for the train would put two onward bus connections in jeopardy: one at Hawes for the bus to Wensleydale and another at Muker for the popular walking village of Keld. We had passengers for both.
He knew from the phone call that there were over a dozen passengers on the train (there turned out to be nearly 20) as opposed to five or six wanting the bus connection, so we waited. In the event, some spirited driving meant we made the first connection at Hawes, although the hikers for Keld found that they would have an extra few miles to do to complete their walk that day.
After picking up more passengers in Hawes we now had a full seated load of 41, plus a few standing, to take over the Buttertubs Pass. Once into Swaledale we dropped passengers at various villages to begin their walks. Not everyone on the bus was there for the walking:; other passengers were heading for a day out shopping in Richmond or Leyburn and at least a couple of likely lads from Preston who didn't seem to fit either category.
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| Setting down hikers in the Swaledale village of Muker. |
Because of waiting for the train we were half-an-hour late at Richmond to begin our next journey to Leyburn and just in time to rescue a passenger from having to pay £20 for a taxi to the town. He'd come up from London on the train to Darlington and then made his way by bus to Richmond and was heading for the steam railway at Leyburn where there the preserved Southern Railway locomotive "British India Line" was paying a special visit in connection with the town's 1940s weekend. He told me that in London there would have been real time information at the bus stop so that he would have known we were running late. I told him that most of the villages we'd come through didn't even have bus stops, let alone real-time ones and the driver pointed out that to make real-time information work you need high-speed internet connections, but most of the villages on the route are still waiting for mains gas!
I had thought that the 1940s weekend would keep me amused during the two-hour stopover at Leyburn, but the sight of middle-aged men dressed up as squaddies and RAF pilots and endless renditions of the Dambusters March on the PA system in the market placed were a little waring, especially in a Brexit context, so I escaped to "The Shawl" a limestone scar on the edge of town with views over the valley to Whernside until it was time to start the return trip.
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| Calling at Richmond on the way home |
We picked up the shoppers in Richmond, although some of them had to be dragged out of the Golden Lion and it became clear that the Preston likely lads had also been visiting quite a few of the town's other hostelries. The walkers rejoined us at various points along the valley, also usually where there was a pub to wait in! At Reeth we paused to wait for the bus coming in the opposite direction that had brought passengers from Middlesbrough that morning and would now be taking them home. The buses are timed to cross at Reeth because the roads in Swaledale are narrow and tortuous, with very few places where two buses can actually pass.
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| The bus to Middlesbrough (left) passing the Preston bus at Reeth at exactly 17.15hrs. |
The scheduling, however, was all in vain as outside Muker we met an oncoming coach! A stand-off ensued until two passengers volunteered to assist the coach driver (and several cars) to reverse round a blind bend and into a pull-in to allow us past.
We weren't quite as full going back over the Buttertubs. This always seems to happen on services like this, where you never seem to bring quite as many back as you take out. I've always wondered why. The returning train passengers were dropped off at Ribblehead, although neither we nor they could know whether their return train would be on time and the driver dropped me off at my local bus stop back in Lancaster at about 7.45pm
I used to organise surveys - and services - like this when I was at work so it was just like old times really for me. The people behind Dales Bus do an excellent job in keeping the services running and I was pleased to be able to get involved and assist.
