Big Stone: a curious climb

Have you visited this place? This isn't the best photo of it (if you have a better one I can use, please do send!) but I think you can see it's an oddity! It’s not very often that places in the Yorkshire Dales remind me of famous landmarks in Sri Lanka.

The Dales version isn’t quite as big as Sigiriya in Sri Lanka, but it’s still remarkable, an impressive stone standing proud on a lonely moorland road south of High Bentham on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales

‘Our’ Sigiriya is imaginatively known as ‘Big Stone’, or the ‘Great Stone of Fourstones’. You won’t be able to find the other three stones but legend says they once lay nearby.

Big Stone is over 5 metres high, and offers views of Ingleborough on a clear day. At some point some strong soul painstakingly carved steps up the side of the stone so you can climb to the top. I think it’s a glacial erratic, transported to this spot when the ice retreated millennia ago.

Some people think the stone was a boundary marker between Yorkshire and Lancashire, others that it was once a meeting place. Some think it was dropped there by the same devil who tried to play a trick at Devil’s Bridge, Kirkby Lonsdale.