Settle Yorkshire Dales
Settle is one of the most attractive and most characterful small market towns in the Yorkshire Dales, a limestone town at the southern edge of the Dales National Park below the dramatic face of Castleberg Crag that serves as the market centre for a wide area of south Ribblesdale and the surrounding dales. The combination of the townscape of seventeenth and eighteenth-century limestone buildings, the remarkable Victorian Folly building in the market square, the dramatic cliff scenery above the town and the position on both the Settle to Carlisle Railway and the Ribble Way walking route makes Settle one of the most rewarding small towns in the national park. The market square is the heart of Settle, its market cross and the famous Folly building of 1679, a three-storey limestone house of extraordinary decorative ambition with carved stone figures in niches above the first-floor windows, creating a townscape focus of considerable character. The Folly was built by a local businessman whose financial difficulties in completing the building gave it the name by which it has been known ever since, and the building's confident eccentricity is entirely appropriate to a town whose limestone architecture and Dales character combine tradition and individuality. The Settle to Carlisle Railway, one of the most scenic and most celebrated railway lines in England, passes through Settle station as its southern terminus and provides the starting point for journeys through the Dales that take in the spectacular Ribblehead Viaduct and the high Pennine moorland before descending to the Eden Valley. The railway's survival after its proposed closure in the 1980s was secured by one of the most successful heritage railway campaigns in British history.