Hawes

The Wensleydale Creamery

Hawes sits at around 250 m above sea level, making it the highest market town in the Yorkshire Dales, and it's the last remaining place in England where Wensleydale cheese is still made on the site it's named after. The Wensleydale Creamery visitor centre has a viewing gallery over the working production floor and a small museum on the cheese's history, which traces back to recipes brought by 12th-century Cistercian monks at nearby Jervaulx Abbey — the creamery itself was founded in 1897 and has survived several closure scares, most famously a mid-1990s crisis that was reversed after a wave of public support partly credited to the cheese's association with the Wallace & Gromit films.

Dales Countryside Museum

Housed in Hawes' former railway station (the line itself closed in 1959), the Dales Countryside Museum covers the practical history of Dales life that the scenery alone doesn't tell — lead mining, hay meadow management, drystone walling techniques, and the region's now-vanished branch railways. It's a useful counterweight to a trip that's otherwise all landscape photography.

Hardraw Force

A mile north of Hawes, reached through the grounds of the Green Dragon Inn (itself a genuine 13th-century pub, and the interior used for the Channel 5 All Creatures Great and Small remake's pub scenes), Hardraw Force drops around 30 m in a single fall — regularly cited as England's highest single-drop waterfall above ground accessible without a climb. Access is through the pub grounds and carries a small admission charge.

Practical notes

Hawes has a proper Tuesday market that still functions as a genuine livestock and produce market for the surrounding farms, not a tourist re-enactment — it's at its busiest and most authentic on that day specifically. The town has no rail service (the old station is the museum) — the nearest is Garsdale on the Settle–Carlisle line, a bus connection away.