Ribblehead Viaduct: The Settle–Carlisle Railway and a Landmark Saved

At the head of the Ribble valley in the Yorkshire Dales, where the road from Ingleton to Hawes crosses an open, boggy moor, a line of twenty-four stone arches stands against the slopes of Whernside. The Ribblehead Viaduct carries the Settle–Carlisle Railway 104 feet above Batty Moss, and for most of its life it has been the defining image of a railway that should, by the usual commercial logic, never have been built here at all. A century later it nearly brought that railway to an end. It is the last stop on a long Day 9 of our Canals and Railways in the Industrial Revolution tour, and this guide explains why the line crosses such exposed country, how the viaduct was built and how it was saved.

A railway through the Yorkshire Dales

The Settle–Carlisle line was born of a quarrel between railway companies. By the 1860s the Midland Railway, based in Derby, had a network reaching deep into northern England but no route of its own to Scotland. Its trains got as far as Ingleton, where the line north was controlled by its great rival, the London and North Western Railway. The two companies could not even agree to share a station there, and passengers changing between them had to walk about a mile. Later arrangements to attach Midland carriages to LNWR trains were worked in a way the Midland regarded as obstructive, and its board decided it needed an independent main line to Carlisle, where it could connect with Scottish railways.

Parliament approved the Settle to Carlisle scheme in 1866. Then a banking collapse shook railway finance, relations with the LNWR improved, and in 1869 the Midland asked Parliament to let it abandon the project. Parliament refused, and the Midland found itself obliged to build an expensive railway through some of the emptiest upland in England. Work began in November 1869.

Having been forced to build it, the Midland built it as a fast main line rather than a winding country branch. It was designed for fast running, so the route of about 72 miles from Settle to Carlisle runs as straight and level as the Pennines allow. The ruling gradient is 1 in 100, and the climb from Settle to Blea Moor, almost all of it at that slope, became known to enginemen as the long drag. The summit at Ais Gill is 1,169 feet above sea level. Keeping to that standard across the grain of the hills meant fourteen tunnels and more than twenty viaducts, and the cost rose from an estimated £2.3 million to about £3.6 million.

Ribblehead is where the logic of the route is plainest. The line needs to reach Blea Moor, the ridge it tunnels beneath on its way into Dentdale, and Batty Moss lies across the path as a broad, wet hollow. A railway built to tighter budgets would have dropped down into it and climbed out again. The Midland bridged it.

The Ribblehead Viaduct’s twenty-four arches

The viaduct was designed by John Sydney Crossley, the Midland’s engineer for the line. It runs for roughly 400 metres (about 440 yards) on a gentle curve, and its piers are built of local limestone set in hydraulic lime mortar. Each of the twenty-four arches spans 45 feet and is turned in brick, laid in five rings behind stone facing; about 1.5 million bricks went into the structure. Some of the limestone blocks weigh several tons. The track is not level across the moor either: the north end is 13 feet higher than the south, keeping the 1 in 100 climb going all the way across.

The piers are tapered, around 13 feet across at the base and narrowing towards the arches, and they stand on foundations sunk about 25 feet into the moor. The original design had eighteen arches; in December 1872 it was changed to twenty-four.

Why is every sixth pier on the Ribblehead Viaduct thicker?

They were built as a safeguard against a chain collapse. In a long run of masonry arches, each arch leans on its neighbours, so the failure of one can push the next over in turn. At Ribblehead every sixth pier is made about 50 per cent thicker than the rest, strong enough to stand on its own if the arch beside it fell. That divides the viaduct into short sections, so that damage to one would stop at the next heavy pier rather than running the whole length of the moor. Once you know to look for them, the thicker piers are easy to pick out from the ground.

Construction, weather and labour

The first stone was laid on 12 October 1870, and for the next four years Batty Moss was one of the busiest building sites in the north of England. Up to 2,300 men worked on the viaduct and on Blea Moor Tunnel, which runs for about 2,629 yards beneath the ridge to the north and was dug largely by hand. The workforce on the whole line is put at about 6,000, most of them itinerant navvies who followed railway contracts around the country, many of them Irish.

The setting made everything harder. The viaduct stands about 980 feet above sea level on a moor with no shelter from Pennine wind, rain and frost, and every block, brick and load of mortar had to be brought to a site with no road or railway of its own. The original contractor, John Ashwell, began work in 1869, but his contract was ended by mutual agreement in October 1871. The arches were completed in 1874, and on 6 September that year the first train crossed the viaduct. Goods trains began running over the line in August 1875, and passenger services opened throughout on 1 May 1876.

Life in the navvy camps at Batty Moss

A workforce that size needed somewhere to live, and the Midland and its contractors built a string of temporary settlements on the moor. Three of them, known as Batty Wife Hole, Sebastopol and Belgravia, survive today as earthworks within a scheduled monument protected by Historic England. Batty Wife Hole was the largest, with 342 people recorded in the 1871 census. It had a library, schools, a post office, a mission house, company offices, a hospital site and a row of shops and ale houses, most of them in timber huts on stone footings. Sebastopol held the works: brickworks and drying sheds, a locomotive shed and workshops, with terraced housing beside them. Belgravia, to the north, was a neighbourhood of individual houses built to standard designs.

A network of tramways linked quarries, brickworks and the construction site, and their raised beds still cross the ground near the viaduct. The camps were dismantled once the work was done in 1875, leaving the moor to sheep again. The human cost was high. More than a hundred men died building the viaduct, through accidents, violence and outbreaks of smallpox that swept through the crowded huts. About two hundred burials from the construction years are recorded at the small church in nearby Chapel-le-Dale, where a memorial remembers those who died building the railway.

Threatened closure and rescue

For a century the Settle–Carlisle line carried passengers and freight between England and Scotland, but by the 1980s traffic had dwindled and many of its stations had closed. The viaduct became central to the argument. On a site this exposed, water works into the masonry and repeated freezing and thawing cracks the stone, and the cost of repairing Ribblehead was one of the main reasons British Rail gave when it moved to close the line. Repairs in 1981–1984 cost around £100,000, the track across the viaduct was reduced to a single line, and trains were limited to 20 miles an hour.

The response was one of the most determined railway campaigns Britain has seen. The Friends of the Settle–Carlisle Line held their first meeting in June 1981. Closure notices went up at the stations in 1984, and tens of thousands of objections followed, among them one famous submission from Ruswarp, a Border collie belonging to the campaigner Graham Nuttall, whose paw print was accepted because he was a fare-paying passenger. Two public inquiries were held. Meanwhile, more people were using the line: passenger journeys rose from about 93,000 in 1983 to around 450,000 in 1989. The viaduct was listed at Grade II* in November 1988, and on 11 April 1989 the government announced that consent to close the railway had been refused.

Repair followed reprieve. A waterproof membrane was laid in 1989, a major restoration of the viaduct ran from 1990 to 1992, and the track and drainage were renewed again between 1999 and 2001. The work has not stopped since. Network Rail examines the viaduct every year and inspects it in detail every six years, and in 2020–2021 it carried out a £2.1 million project in which laser and drone surveys mapped the structure for the first time, cracked blockwork was repaired and the drainage over all twenty-four arches was improved. Eight stations that had closed along the line have since reopened.

Can you still ride a train across the Ribblehead Viaduct?

Yes. The Settle–Carlisle line is a working railway, and since 2020 its scheduled passenger trains have been run by Northern, and freight trains use it too. Ribblehead has its own station close to the viaduct, with a small visitor centre. Crossing by train shows the moor and the Dales fells to either side, but the viaduct itself is best appreciated from the ground, which is how our group sees it.

Why rail heritage is a landscape story

Ribblehead makes a useful contrast with the other railway sites on the tour. The Stockton and Darlington Railway belongs to the 1820s, when the challenge was proving that steam locomotives could haul coal and passengers at all. The Ffestiniog Railway in Snowdonia shows a narrow-gauge line squeezing a slate railway around the contours of a mountainside. By the 1870s, the Settle–Carlisle line shows a confident main-line railway imposing its own gradient on the hills, crossing a moor that earlier engineers would have gone round. It is the last great British main line built mostly by hand.

The setting is part of the monument. The viaduct sits in a landscape of limestone pavements, peat moor and the drystone walls that divide the Dales into fields, a pattern explored in our article on dry stone walls and the history of the British Isles. Seen from Batty Moss, with Whernside behind and Ingleborough across the valley, the arches look less like an intrusion than another layer in a long history of people working this upland. The preservation campaign won because people valued the railway and the landscape together, and it is hard to imagine either without the other.

How much walking does a visit to Ribblehead involve?

Expect a short walk across open moorland on a surfaced path from the parking area just south of the viaduct, off the B6255, with the option of walking up to the foot of the piers on rougher grass. The tour is rated Level 2 (Moderate): most days involve three to five hours of activity, equivalent to walking up to 8 kilometres, sometimes on uneven ground. Ribblehead is exposed in all seasons, so a windproof, waterproof layer and sturdy shoes are worth having to hand even on a fine day.

Seeing Ribblehead on the tour

Ribblehead comes at the end of a day that moves from the earliest years of the railway age to its high point. Day 9 begins with a stop at the Sankey Viaduct at Newton-le-Willows, designed by George Stephenson and opened in 1830, then a cruise on the Lancaster Canal across the Lune Aqueduct, John Rennie’s contour waterway of the 1790s. In the afternoon the group crosses into the Dales to Ribblehead and hears the story of its building and rescue, with time permitting a stop in the village of Askrigg before continuing to Windermere for two nights.

Seen in that sequence, the viaduct makes sense as part of a much longer story of how Britain moved goods and people across difficult ground. Our guide to Britain’s canals, railways and industrial heritage shows where Ribblehead fits in the full route, from Manchester and Wales through the Lake District to Scotland, the north-east and London. For dates, inclusions and the complete itinerary, see the Canals and Railways in the Industrial Revolution tour page, where small groups of 6 to 14 travellers explore these sites with an Odyssey Program Leader.