Buttertubs Pass
Buttertubs Pass is one of the most dramatic and celebrated mountain roads in England, cutting through the heart of the Yorkshire Dales between the market town of Hawes in Wensleydale and Thwaite in Swaledale. Rising to approximately 526 metres (1,726 feet) above sea level, it is the highest public road in North Yorkshire and one of the highest in England. The pass earned international fame in 2014 when the Tour de France Grand Départ swept through this landscape, with the world's top cyclists racing over its flanks before huge crowds that lined the moorland for miles. That single event brought global attention to a road that locals and cycling enthusiasts had long known as one of Britain's finest stretches of tarmac, combining exhilarating climbs, raw natural beauty, and sweeping views that seem to stretch across half of northern England.
The pass takes its remarkable name from the Buttertubs themselves — a series of naturally occurring limestone potholes just beside the road near its summit. These vertical shafts, some dropping more than 20 metres into the earth, are a geological curiosity formed by acidic water dissolving the limestone along joint lines over thousands of years. The name is thought to come from the tradition of dairy farmers on their way to market at Hawes lowering their butter into the cool shafts to keep it fresh during warm weather before the days of refrigeration. Whether this story is literally true or has been embellished over generations, it captures perfectly the intimate relationship between this working landscape and the people who have lived and traded within it for centuries.
Standing at the summit on a clear day is one of those experiences that rewards the effort of getting there with something genuinely breathtaking. The road unspools in both directions into deep valleys, with the fells rising on either side as rounded, heather-draped shoulders of moorland. The Pennine sky has a particular quality here — vast, luminous, and changeable — and on a breezy day the wind comes off the high ground with enough force to make conversation an effort. The sound is mostly of wind and the occasional distant sheep. In summer the heather blooms purple across the flanks of Lovely Seat to the east and Great Shunner Fell to the west, the latter being the highest point in this part of the Dales at 716 metres. When mist descends, the pass takes on an almost primeval atmosphere, the potholes appearing suddenly at the roadside as if the earth has simply opened without warning.
The road itself is narrow, single-track in places, and carries a genuine sense of exposure. Dry-stone walls accompany sections of the route before the summit vegetation becomes too sparse and windswept to support even the effort of walling. The tarmac surface is maintained but can be affected by frost heave and winter ice, and the sheep that roam freely across the fells treat the road as their own. Looking north from the summit, the view drops steeply down into Swaledale, one of the quieter and more unspoiled of the Dales valleys, with the hamlet of Thwaite visible far below surrounded by the characteristic pattern of small fields divided by pale limestone walls. To the south, Wensleydale opens out in a broader and greener sweep, with Hawes sitting at its head as a small but busy hub for the surrounding farming community.
The broader area around Buttertubs Pass sits firmly within the Yorkshire Dales National Park, established in 1954, and the landscape retains much of the character that has defined it for centuries — pastoral in the valleys, wild and open on the tops. The Pennine Way long-distance footpath passes nearby, crossing Great Shunner Fell on a well-worn route between Hawes and Thwaite, offering walkers a complementary experience to the road route. Hardraw Force, England's largest single-drop waterfall above ground, is only a few miles away in the valley below. Hawes itself is home to the Wensleydale Creamery, where the famous crumbly white cheese has been made since the late nineteenth century and which welcomes visitors year-round.
Reaching Buttertubs Pass requires either driving or cycling the B6270 and associated minor roads between Hawes and Thwaite. There is a small car parking area near the pothole features at the summit, allowing visitors to stop and examine the limestone formations on foot with appropriate caution. The road is generally passable year-round but can be closed or treacherous in heavy snow and ice during winter months; conditions at the summit can be dramatically different from those in the valleys below, so checking road conditions before setting out in colder months is advisable. Cyclists willing to tackle the climb from either direction will find it a genuinely challenging and memorable ascent, and the road remains popular with road cyclists throughout the spring and summer. The Tour de France crowds of 2014 are long gone, but the legacy of that event lives on in occasional commemorative sportives and the increased recognition the pass now receives from cycling visitors from across Europe.
One lesser-known aspect of the Buttertubs landscape is its rich prehistoric significance. The surrounding fells contain evidence of Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation, including field systems and settlements that attest to thousands of years of human presence in this seemingly remote upland environment. The Viking heritage of the dale names is also evident throughout the area — Swaledale, Thwaite, Muker, and Keld all carry Old Norse roots, reflecting the Scandinavian settlement that reshaped the language and settlement patterns of northern England after the ninth century. The word "thwaite" itself means a meadow or clearing in Old Norse, a reminder that these valleys were once being cleared and settled by people as enterprising and determined as the farmers who work the same land today.