Ribblehead Viaduct
The Ribblehead Viaduct carrying the Settle to Carlisle railway across the limestone valley at the head of Ribblesdale in the Yorkshire Dales is one of the most iconic and most photographed pieces of Victorian railway engineering in Britain, a structure of twenty-four arches spanning nearly 500 metres across the valley floor at a maximum height of 32 metres whose combination of bold engineering, Yorkshire millstone grit construction and dramatic setting below the peak of Whernside creates one of the defining images of the Dales landscape. Built between 1869 and 1875 by the Midland Railway using a workforce of over two thousand navvies who lived in temporary settlements around the construction site, the viaduct was nearly demolished in the 1980s before a campaign saved both the structure and the entire Settle to Carlisle line. The construction of the Ribblehead Viaduct and the Settle to Carlisle Railway was one of the most ambitious engineering undertakings of the Victorian period, driven by the Midland Railway's determination to reach Scotland by its own route without dependence on the competing companies whose lines provided the existing connections. The exposed and difficult terrain of the Yorkshire Dales and the Cumbrian fells required the construction of numerous tunnels, viaducts and embankments in challenging conditions, and the navvy camps established at Ribblehead during construction grew into temporary towns of several thousand people whose presence is recorded in the registers of the isolated moorland churches. The viaduct can be approached from the Ribblehead Station car park on the B6255 road, and the walk across the valley floor to the base of the piers provides close appreciation of the scale and quality of the masonry. The Three Peaks circular walk using Pen y Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside as its targets passes close to the viaduct and the wide Ingleborough summit provides an aerial perspective on the structure in its landscape setting.