Inside the Hoffman Kiln

I travel miles sometimes, to stand inside great gaping holes and wander around post industrial wastelands. Not, perhaps everyones bag, but it does something for me! So I was very pleased and surprised to be taken here, only a mile or so from home, by friends on a very pleasant Sunday afternoon walk. Pleased, certainly - but also I might add a little ashamed that I'd known nothing about it previously. The skyline of Langcliffe Quarry one could hardly miss - a great foreboding black scar on the hillside, visible from miles, looming behind Settle. Certainly as a climber I was aware of it too. But not of it's history, of this industrial-scale lime works. This truly vast German-designed limekiln, worked in rotation arouind it's huge bays, each cycle taking six weeks to complete. Lime kilns to me had always been little curiosities stumbled upon in the hills, little tumble-down archways, clearly only back-garden affairs in comparison!