I often travel over to Gisburn from Leeds to meet up with a couple of my Lancashire friends for lunch at the White Bull. I love the journey – the A59 is one of my favourite rides. Just north of Addingham, I’ve often noticed a large hill on the right which looked like a good place to climb up for some great views and made it my ambition to find out what it was called and make it to the top one day, which is just what I did last weekend.
Above is the view of the Beacon from Addingham where we set off from. We parked near St Peters church, which is well worth a tiny detour to see. It seems as though it has been a place of worship since Anglo Saxon times. Click on the photo of the information board pictured below and enlarge it to read about it.
Theres an interesting board about Addingham too. So back over the tiny bridge onto the road through Addingham for a short while, we meet the Dales Way and go down some steps to a bridge across the River Wharfe.
Along a path beside a small stream and through a gate by a farm onto another country road. We walked up the road a short way passing one footpath and joined the next one on the right over a gate and crossed a very muddy field. You then hit an incredibly narrow bridleway. Fine to walk single file but how the hell a horse gets through I will never know and thank goodness we didn’t meet one coming the other way!! This eventually meet another country road and we turned left walking for a few hundred feet until we climbed over a small stillest over a wall by a large house and through some woods, coming out onto another very boggy field. We then hit the road which comes up from Beamsley to the bottom of the Beacon.
From there we climbed to the top to these magnificent views.
Here are some plaques on the trig point. One commemorating the crew of a Lancaster bomber that crashed on the slopes of the Beacon in 1945 and the other about the Beacon where bronze age burial mounds have been found. Again click on the photos and enlarge them to read the info.
