From York: Yorkshire Dales, Bolton Castle & Wensleydale

Head northwest from York through the Vale of York and up into the Yorkshire Dales National Park, climbing into the limestone upland where the landscape dramatically transforms. The guide introduces the history of the Scrope family — the most powerful medieval dynasty in the North Riding — and explains why Bolton Castle was built to control the Pennine passes between Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Bolton Castle stands in the middle of Wensleydale, a quadrangular fortress on the courtyard plan: four towers at the corners, residential ranges connecting them, designed to be fully habitable as well as defensive. Built 1378–1399 by Richard le Scrope, Lord Chancellor under Richard II, it was the principal seat of the Scrope family for two centuries. Walk the great hall, the chapel, the tower rooms, and the dungeon. The guide covers the castle's most famous episode: Mary Queen of Scots arrived here in July 1568 after fleeing Scotland following her defeat at the Battle of Langside. She was a guest-prisoner for six months — the beginning of nineteen years of English captivity that ended at Fotheringhay in 1587.

Drive up-dale to Hawes, the highest market town in the Yorkshire Dales. The Wensleydale Creamery has been making the local cheese here since 1897 — the same crumbly, slightly honeyed white cheese that Wallace (of Wallace & Gromit) declares 'just the ticket'. Nick Park's animation is credited with saving the creamery from closure in the 1990s after sales collapsed. Visit the viewing gallery to watch cheese being made, sample the varieties, and explore the adjacent Dales Countryside Museum, which tells the story of lead mining, sheep farming and droving that built this landscape.

Descend through Bishopdale into Wharfedale, stopping at Kettlewell — the limestone-and-grey-slate village chosen as the Greendale setting for the Calendar Girls film, where the local WI famously posed for an unconventional charity calendar. Then to Pateley Bridge in Nidderdale, a market town of dark Millstone Grit, where the Old Sweet Shop on the High Street claims the title of world's oldest sweet shop, selling the same barley sugars, acid drops and humbugs it has offered since 1827.