The Ribble Way - A Walker's Guidebook

The 71-mile Ribble Way, described in this guidebook, traces the full length of the Ribble valley and leads walkers through some of the finest scenery in northwest England. Route described from the estuary mouth, near Preston, to the river’s source on Cam Fell in the Yorkshire Dales.

Although Lancastrians might like to claim it as their own, the River Ribble actually springs from limestone high on Cam Fell in the heart of Three Peaks country, in the Yorkshire Dales. Gathering water from the countless streams that spill from this sombre upland, the river quickly asserts its identity as it forces a passage between high, rugged moorland hills. Eventually breaking free to meander through gentler countryside south of Settle, it still has another 10 miles (16.1km) to go before broaching the boundary with Lancashire. And Yorkshire folk with long memories will remember an older border between the rival counties that ran south of Sawley, and they might say that the river remains in Yorkshire for a further 10 miles (16.1km).

By then the river has assumed a completely different character, winding lazily through alternating pasture and ancient woodland, where old manor houses and early-18th-century cottages offer a welcome contrast to the all-too-pervasive tide of modernity. At Preston the river encounters the only sizeable conurbation along its course, but even here it remains largely isolated from the commerce and industry of the town. It flows instead below the elegant Victorian parks that were laid out for the recreation of the thousands of workers brought in to operate some of the first factory mills built in the country, replacing what had previously been a cottage industry.

Beyond Preston the river changes dramatically yet again, now running straight to the Irish Sea through an almost featureless plain that was once regularly inundated by the tide. Dykes and drainage ditches have turned what was once a virtually dead-flat waste into productive arable fields, although further to the west a vast expanse of the salt marsh still remains, attracting huge populations of birds, particularly in winter, which find a rich and plentiful source of food in the shallows and mud.

The Ribble Way

The idea for a long-distance footpath along the course of the River Ribble originated in the 1960s with the members of the Preston and Fylde group of the Ramblers' Association. The original survey suggested a mainly riverbank route from the mouth of the Ribble, where it flows into the Irish Sea, to its source far above Gearstones, a former drovers’ inn beside the moorland between Ribblehead and Widdale. This plan immediately ran into difficulty, however, as more than half the proposed way relied on the use of private fishermen's paths. Further progress was thwarted by a storm of local objection, and it was not until the 1980s that an alternative route adopting existing rights of way attracted official support. The first leg of the path, covering just over 40 miles (almost 65km) between Longton and Gisburn Bridge, was opened by Mike Harding, president of the Ramblers' Association, and Derek Barber, chairman of the Countryside Commission, on 1 June 1985.

Because the Ribble Way follows the south bank of the river, a coastal start to the walk was, and still is, frustrated by the lack of a convenient crossing over the River Douglas, which joins the Ribble on the same bank around 3 miles (4.8km) from the sea. The lowest bridging point across the Douglas is that spanned by the A59 some 5 miles (8km) above the confluence of the Douglas and the Ribble, so if the walk started from the coast, this would involve a good 10 mile (16km) detour up to the bridge and back to the confluence again.