The difficult part about loving a place or a region is that it’s easy to keep returning to the same places over and over again. Visiting the Lake District is like this for me. Although there are countless hills to walk up and views to photograph, I’ve tended to keep returning to my favourites: Ambleside, Honister, Derwentwater and Keswick. I have to remind myself to see other places: to explore more and to find new favourite places.
The Lake District is bounded to the east – loosely – by the M6 motorway. This obviously doesn’t mean that the beautiful countryside ends there, as it stretches across much of northern England. Around five miles north-east of the motorway junction at Tebay, limestone forms small hills with beautiful views across rolling farm land towards the distant fells.
The Great Asby Scar is part of a limestone pavement also encompassing Orton Scar, Grange Scar and Little Asby Scar. The “pavement” is an expanse of relatively level ground across which the rock has been heavily eroded by glaciation and subsequent rain to become pitted and split, leaving fissures in which grasses, mosses, ferns and occasionally trees grow.
The land is grazed by sheep and so local farmers have made use of the limestone to build enclosing walls, with an occasional fence and large stile thrown in for good measure. We walked a couple of miles across the landscape, choosing the natural paths formed between the rocky outcrops and photographing the views and the natural phenomenon.
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