This year marks the centenary of Alfred Wainwright, author of the famous Lakeland Fells guides. The media has been full of programmes and articles about Wainwright and his love of Lakeland, but rather less has been said of his books outside that area. A Pennine Way Companion, published in 1969 was the first, but with Walks In Limestone Country he returns to the more area-specific format. Or rather, he doesn’t. It is, as the title suggests, just that – a collection of walks in the south-western Yorkshire Dales, rather than a comprehensive guide to a particular area in the style of his earlier books. Not all the limestone areas are covered – the imposing and unique areas to the east around Grassington are ignored, as indeed are two Lakeland-sized peaks (Great Whernside and Buckden Pike) north of there. The book is subtitled The Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-Y-Ghent areas of Yorkshire but Malham, well to the east, is included. The somewhat skeletal nature of coverage is highlighted even more by the sketch map on the back cover. It is hard not to conclude that this is a book made up from completed parts of a more comprehensive Yorkshire Dales project that Wainwright tired of and then abandoned, later modifying it to a list of walks (and possibly rushed out to meet a publishing deadline - perhaps unlikely given his notoriously stubborn nature but you never know). It is worth noting that Wainwright remarried in 1970 (after an acrimonious and protracted divorce) so his mind understandably may well have been elsewhere around this time.
The walks themselves though are as superb and well-documented as you would expect from the man. One or two areas (Ingleborough in particular) get a very detailed Lakeland Fells-style treatment (again hinting at a more ambitious original book), and some less obvious but very worthwhile walks are included as well. Highly recommended.
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