A walk by the Aire

Half a mile or so north of Airton, on the way to Malham, lies the hamlet of Scosthrop. There's a farm shop and tearoom here, which provided a tasty lunch and respite from the drizzle for our camera club group.

At the back there's a wonderful view up the dale and you can probably make out in the distance the limestone scar that is the famous Malham Cove. 

Just opposite the farm shop is the handsome Scosthrop Manor (below) built in 1603. (If you want a peek inside this house, see this press article HERE.) 

From here we walked along the riverside path back to Airton.

The river is the infant River Aire, whose source is a stream from Malham Tarn that disappears into the limestone and then surfaces in a spring just outside Malham. It winds its way south, gathering strength, eventually passing through Saltaire and on through Leeds to its confluence with the Ouse.  I did wonder whether the water I could see here might arrive in Saltaire before or after me. Google informs me that the river flows on average at 5 miles per hour and the distance to Saltaire is about 25 miles so it might be there in about five hours. Interesting. 

Along the way we passed bits of old machinery related to when the Airton mill was working: various cogs and sluices. 

And then we came to the mill itself, once a corn mill for the village, then a cotton spinning mill during the Industrial Revolution. 

It's now been converted into apartments: Riverside Walk. One of our group told of when he was working on the construction site during the conversion. He'd just gone for a tea break when the bit of the building he had been in suddenly collapsed! Such disasters notwithstanding, the conversion appears to have been sympathetically done. The loggia below had a bit of a French feel to it, I thought.