The largest chamber in the White Scar Cave complex is also the largest known cave chambers in England – the 90m long Battlefield Cavern.

White Scar Caves were uncovered in 1923 by two amateur geologists, one a student, who noticed a cave mouth behind a waterfall – still the entrance visitors use today. Modern visitors follow a well lit path between waterfalls and strange, organic looking rock formations into galleries laden with pale coloured stalactites and stalagmites, and standing on a steel grid walkway you can see the waters rushing past below you. The rock formation highlights, well lit up for your benefit, are the lifelike Judge’s Head, the Arum Lily, the Devil’s Tongue and of course the vast, ancient Battlefield Cavern. The rolling valleys and landscape of the Yorkshire Dales were created by glaciers hundreds of years ago, but Battlefield Cavern has been dated at being around 200,000 years old. Its current crops of stalactites are of the very fine variety and hang from the roof in stunningly delicate clusters, at the very top of the cavern are clusters of rarer fluorescing stalactites.

The public show cave entrance is just west of Ingleborough.

Written by  Andy Kinght.

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