Country & Coast: Walk clockwise and take the time to enjoy stunning views

A few Three Peakers were on Ingleborough at the weekend when I was there, but they seemed too exhausted and/or focused on the final downhill stretch to Horton to appreciate their surroundings and might just as well have been in Leeds’ City Square. A couple of them grunted ‘hullo’, swigged from water bottles and set off without even bothering to take in the view.

Ingleborough has the most famous mountain profile in England outside the Lakes, and many can draw it from memory. Its table-topped summit - so flat in places it seems to have been fashioned with the use of a spirit level - is also the foremost landmark in the southern Yorkshire Dales.

It may be a thousand or so feet slighter than Table Mountain which overlooks Cape Town, but what it lacks in height Ingleborough more than makes up for in aura.

The guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright said climbing Ingleborough was the birthright of all Yorkshire folk, and that was the case long before cars and buses carried them across the A65 from West Riding mills and factories.

A popular excursion was to catch a train to Clapham and approach the mountain on what for many is still the best route, the track leading past the famous Ingleborough Cave. Their return leg was by the Sulber Nick path to Horton and a southbound connection on the Settle-Carlisle line.

Wainwright took the Ordnance Survey to task for naming it Ingleborough Hill on older maps.

“It is every inch a mountain,” he complained. “And although not the highest in England as was once thought and is overtopped by many others, it’s one of the grandest.”

The most direct route is from the village of Ingleton, and the most visually impressive for mountain scenery is the Three Peaks path from Chapel-le-Dale. But whichever way you choose to arrive, it’s the summit that makes Ingleborough special. It’s hard to think of a more fascinating square half-mile in Yorkshire.

A big cairn at the Ingleton end is the remains of a tower erected as a hospice in 1830, and it’s said that the opening ceremony became so chaotic that the building was semi-demolished. Sounds like quite a party.

There’s also the remains of an Iron Age fort, with a few hut circles still visible. Then there’s the astonishing view, helpfully explained by a toposcope and best experienced late in the day when the sun’s dying embers turn Morecambe Bay red.

But most of this is missed by thousands who reach the summit, not just walkers but runners and cyclists too. Since the usual Three Peaks circuit is followed anti-clockwise, climbing Penyghent and Whernside before Ingleborough, perhaps it should be done in reverse.

Then, Three Peakers will have time to enjoy Ingleborough before fatigue takes over.