White Scar Cave Yorkshire
White Scar Cave near Ingleton in the Yorkshire Dales is the longest show cave in Britain, a system of limestone caverns extending over a kilometre into the Great Scar Limestone beneath the slopes of Ingleborough that provides one of the most varied and most spectacular underground experiences available in the British Isles. The guided tour takes visitors through a sequence of passages, caverns and formations whose variety of scale and character includes the enormous Battlefield Cavern, one of the largest cave chambers in Britain, discovered only in 1990. The cave was discovered in 1923 by Cambridge student Christopher Long who explored it by candlelight and subsequently developed it as a show cave, opening it to visitors in 1925. The original passages explored by Long are characterised by the Rough Stream, an underground river whose course must be followed for part of the route, and the cave retains the character of an active cave system in which water continues to shape the geology and the formations. The Battlefield Cavern, 100 metres long and 30 metres high with the ceiling covered in calcite straw formations, is the visual highlight of the cave and one of the most impressive cave chambers in Britain. The stalactites and stalagmites of various passages, some of considerable scale, demonstrate the full range of speleothem formation types developed over the hundreds of thousands of years of the cave's history. The location of White Scar Cave at the foot of Ingleborough, with the Three Peaks walk passing nearby, makes it an excellent destination combined with the walking available in this section of the Dales.