Landscape

The West Pennine Moors is a special landscape that is contained within the Southern Pennines Landscape Joint Character Area (JCA36).

Key characteristics of this landscape area include:

• A large scale sweeping landform with an open character, created by exposed gritstone moors, treeless and unpopulated.
• Deeply incised by cloughs and narrow valleys with steep wooded side, with broader valleys on the fringes.
• Extensive views in all directions from elevated locations.
• Prominent features, such as windfarms, communications masts, power lines and quarries.
• Early packhorse routes across moorlands, and later main, road, rail and canal routes followed the valleys.
• Densely populated valley bottoms with distinctive stone buildings extending along valley sides.
• Gritstone villages and towns centred around industrial heritage of textiles and engineering, with older settlements on moorland fringes.
• Reservoirs and related artefacts common throughout the area.

The Valleys

• Narrow valleys, often steep wooded sides and some pastures and meadows on the valley bottoms
• Smaller scale field pattern, with gritstone wall and occasional hedges
• Localised areas of wetland, including wet woodland, in valley bottoms and alongside streams

The Moorland Fringes

• Enclosed pastures defined by strong rectilinear patterns of drystone walls
• Mosaics of varying grasslands important for wildlife, including wading birds and twite, a small upland bird almost entirely restricted to the Southern Pennines
• Clear patterns or tree cover, with wooded cloughs, broad-leaved woodland along watercourses and on steep slopes and valley sides, and copses associated with farmsteads and villages

The Moorlands

• Moorlands of blanket bog or heathland, including areas of heather, cotton grass with associated mires, flushes and bracken
• Very few tree, limited to groups of trees around farmsteads, or along watercourses or in cloughs
• Predominantly unenclosed, with only occasional gritstone field barns and many archaeological features such as carved rocks or old tracks