L imestone stretches on all sides like an inland ocean – appropriately enough, since the shimmering white rock has its ancient origins in coral, shells and the skeletons of sea creatures. We advance carefully, stepping on clints (blocks of rock) and avoiding grykes (the deep fissures between them). It’s a warm, dry day and, even if it were not, limestone drains better than most types of terrain. For a long while, it’s broad, flat and hallucinatory and then, suddenly, the rocky sea collapses like a waterfall and we’re at the edge of a huge fault. The words Yorkshire Dales might evoke pretty villages and walled-in sheep fields, but this landscape is raw and wild, the kind of natural realm WH Auden celebrated in his poem In Praise of Limestone , and the kind that prompts geological speculation and inward ruminations. To cap it all, there are just three of us and nothing much and no one else all the way to the far horizons. It’s my first decent yomp of the spring.…