Why limestone country asks more of us

The limestone dales of Britain — the White Peak of Derbyshire, the southern Yorkshire Dales around Malham and Ingleborough, the Mendips, parts of the Cotswolds and the fringes of the North York Moors — are among the most walked-over landscapes in the country, and among the most easily damaged. Limestone is soft and soluble. Rain and time have carved it into pavements, scars, gorges and caves, and the soils that sit on top are often no more than a few centimetres deep. That thin skin is what makes these places so special, and it is also what makes them so quick to scar.

The good news is that the damage caused by walkers is almost entirely avoidable. A few habits, learned once and repeated everywhere, will keep you safe and leave the dale as you found it.

Reading the ground: clints, grykes and scars

Limestone pavement is the signature feature of these dales, and it is far more fragile than it looks. The surface is broken into blocks — clints — separated by fissures called grykes, which can run more than a metre deep. Those grykes stay cool and damp, and they shelter a whole community of ferns, mosses and flowers that cannot survive on the exposed clint tops. Stand on a gryke edge and it crumbles; walk a new line across pavement a few times and you have widened a gap that took centuries to form.

So walk on the clint tops, not along the gryke edges, and where a worn path already crosses a pavement, follow it rather than plotting your own line. Where the route is waymarked, the waymarkers are usually placed to keep feet off the most delicate strips.

• Keep to established paths even when they are muddy or busy — a parallel path is a new scar.
• Never widen a path by stepping round a puddle; wet limestone is greasy, so wear boots with a decent sole and walk through the middle.
• Avoid cutting down loose scree below scars, where every step starts a small slide.
• Do not build cairns, move rocks or "improve" a route. What looks like a helpful marker is often someone else's vandalism.

The thin soils and the flowers they hold

Limestone grassland is a priority habitat, and it is astonishingly easy to destroy. The classic dale flora — hart's-tongue fern, wall-rue, spring sandwort, dark-red helleborine, angular Solomon's seal, limestone bedstraw, blue moor-grass, wild thyme and common rock-rose — grows low and often looks like nothing much from a distance. Between May and July it is at its best, and also at its most vulnerable.

Picking is illegal for many of these species and pointless anyway; they rarely survive the journey home. The bigger risk is the boot. A single step off the path can flatten a clump of rare flowers that will not set seed that year, and repeated footfall turns flower-rich turf into a bare, muddy patch that coarse grasses colonise.

• Photograph with your feet on the path and your zoom doing the work.
• Stop for lunch on rock or bare ground, not in the middle of a flower-rich bank.
• If you are unsure what you are standing on, assume it is something rare.

Dogs, livestock and ground-nesting birds

Limestone dales are working landscapes. Sheep graze almost everywhere, and cattle and ponies are used on many nature reserves to keep the grassland open. A dog off the lead among ewes with lambs is a serious problem for the farmer and a genuine risk to the dog.

The Countryside Code is clear: on open access land, keep dogs on a lead no more than two metres long between 1 March and 31 July, to protect ground-nesting birds such as curlew, lapwing and skylark. On limestone pavement, keep the lead short regardless of the season, because a dog trotting along a gryke edge does exactly the damage a boot does — only faster. Near any livestock, put the lead on and give a wide berth. If cattle come towards you, let the lead go, walk calmly away and do not get between a cow and her calf.

Bag dog waste and carry it out. These soils are nutrient-poor by nature; added nutrients encourage nettles and rank grass and push the wildflowers out.

Caves, potholes and the underground world

Limestone country is hollow. Sinkholes, shakeholes, cave entrances and potholes open without warning, and they deserve particular respect. Do not shelter in a cave mouth to escape a shower, and never light a fire in or near one. British bats use these entrances for roosting and hibernation, and a winter disturbance can wake a bat and burn the fat it needs to survive until spring. Between November and March especially, keep well back and keep noise down.

Gated entrances are gated for a reason — conservation, safety or both. Climbing them is both trespass and a poor idea. Proper caving needs training, a helmet, reliable lamps, spare light and experienced company; it is not a spontaneous detour from a walk. Sinkholes and loose pothole edges are best admired from a safe distance.

Small habits that make a big difference

None of this requires special equipment or expertise, just attention. Plan a route that uses public rights of way and waymarked trails rather than inventing lines across open access land. Check the weather — limestone becomes treacherous in the wet, and dale bottoms flood quickly after heavy rain. Carry out everything you carry in. Leave gates as you find them, and if you spot an obvious problem, report it to the national park authority or the land manager rather than trying to fix it yourself.

These dales have absorbed the footsteps of generations. Walked with care, they will absorb ours too, and the flowers, ferns and bats will still be there for the next lot.