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High Force

High Force is one of those places I’ve heard about my whole life. It’s a wide and tall waterfall on the River Tees that has been part of one side of my family history for many generations. So how I managed to get to the ripe old age of 33 and never see it I don’t quite know.

There are two photos of it on the walls of our house, but neither of them does it justice. You hear it before you see it, as the rumble of its fast-flowing waters comes at you through the trees long before the narrow, winding path opens up onto a great arena carved out of the rock by millennia of erosion. After the rains we’ve been having it came down at an impressive whack, and threw up a great smoky mist from the surface of the water where it fell.

We stood at the bottom for maybe half an hour, taking pictures and clambering around on the rocks and fallen trees, and then climbed up to the top, where it tips over the edge of the cliff and down a full 20 metres to crash into the pool below.

There, just above the torrent, you would never have guessed that you were standing on top of one of the UK’s most impressive waterfalls. It was so quiet and gentle, and the water seemed to just slip away, as though it had disappeared into thin air, rather than being driven at speed towards a terrifying drop.

We did the obligatory, and drove along the river’s course to Cow Green Reservoir, where we parked the car and walked a couple of hours along the Pennine Way and back to see Cauldron Snout, the great cascade of waterfalls that leads to High Force. But the rocks were so wet and slippery there was a real risk we would have slipped in and never been seen again if we went too far, so we never did make it down to the bottom of the chain.

Our second stop of the day was Hadrian’s Wall.

It’s another one of those places about which you hear so much as a kid, and you imagine some grand, wide motorway of a wall like the Great Wall of China, but it’s not like that. It is, nevertheless, a very impressive feat of engineering. We walked along a perfectly-preserved section from Housesteads Fort, where it would be wide enough to (carefully) drive a small car along the top.

It is in remarkable condition, and you can look out along the ridge of the hills to see it snaking across their top edges like a brick and rock spine. Turn to one side and you see that you are tramping through a fern-filled wood. Turn to the other and the true majesty of this wall is apparent, as the land on which it is built drops away 100ft or more to a distant field below. How many people must have been killed in the process of constructing so sturdy a wall on so precarious a ridge, we can only guess.

Unfortunately the light was poor, and it didn’t make for brilliant photos. While I did take some, and I’ve since downloaded and viewed them, I’d rather close with another picture from High Force of a stream along the path to the falls.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.