Malham Cove is a natural limestone formation, regarded as a national beauty spot, near Malham, North Yorkshire, England. It comprises a huge, curved limestone cliff at the top of a valley, with a fine area of limestone pavement at the top.
Adam Walker described the cove like this in 1779:
"This beautiful rock is like the age-tinted wall of a prodigious castle; the stone is very white, and from the ledges hang various shrubs and vegetables, which with the tints given it by the bog water gives it a variety that I never before saw so pleasing in a plain rock".
Originally, a large waterfall cascaded over the cove as a glacier melted above it. The remnants of a stream which once dropped over the cliff flows out of the small lake of Malham Tarn, on the moors above the cove. The stream now disappears under the ground at the appropriately named 'Water Sinks', several kilometres before its valley reaches the top of the cove. A stream of similar size emerges from a cave at the bottom of the cove, and it was for many years assumed that the two streams were in fact one and the same. However, experiments with dyes have now shown that this is not actually the case. Rather two streams go underground at different points, cross paths without mixing behind the cliff, and reappear many miles apart. That this is possible testifies to the complexity of the system of caves behind the cliff, which are thought to date back around 50,000 years.
The lip of the cove has been subject to more erosion than the sides, creating a curved shape. A colossal amount of water used to plummet over this waterfall, which measures 80 m high and over 300 m wide and some experts say that the flow would have been about the same as that of the Niagara Falls today. However, the limestone does not get sufficiently saturated for the fall to become active nowadays. The last record of water flowing over the fall in any kind of volume goes back to the early 19th century after a period of heavy precipitation.
The Cove and nearby Gordale Scar, were featured on the TV programme "Seven Natural Wonders" as one of the main wonders of Yorkshire.
The valley formed at the end of the last Ice Age when the ground was frozen and the normally porous limestone was made impermeable. The frozen ground meant that meltwater from the melting ice sheet formed a large river flowing over the surface and this in turn eroded the valley that we see today. The water from this river cascaded over Malham Cove to form a huge waterfall. When the climate became warmer, around 12,000 years ago the ground thawed and the river in the valley disappeared underground leaving the valley dry as we see it today.
