Hawes sits at the head of Wensleydale at approximately 260 metres above sea level — high enough that it gets more snow than the lower dale and enough wind from the west to discourage the faint-hearted. It is the highest market town in England, a working agricultural town rather than a tourist resort, and the centre of the cheese production, rope making and sheep farming that have defined upper Wensleydale for centuries.
For a town of 900 people, it packs a great deal in. The Tuesday market has been running since 1699. The Wensleydale Creamery produces the most famous cheese in the Dales from a site in the town. The Dales Countryside Museum covers the social and agricultural history of the region from the neolithic to the present. And Hardraw Force — England's highest single-drop waterfall above ground — is a mile up the road.
The Wensleydale Creamery moved to Hawes in 1897, centralising production that had previously been scattered across farm dairies in the dale. It was nearly closed in 1992 — a community buyout saved it — and has since become a significant visitor attraction as well as a working dairy.
The creamery offers tours of the production facility, a museum covering the cheese's nine-hundred-year history, and a shop selling the full range of Wensleydale products. The classic white crumbly Wensleydale is made here daily from milk supplied by farms in the surrounding dale.
Hawes market runs every Tuesday on the main street, with a livestock market in the auction mart beside it. The street market covers agricultural supplies, local produce, secondhand goods and the usual mix of market stalls. The livestock market — primarily sheep, with cattle at certain times of year — gives Hawes its character as a working agricultural town rather than a prettified visitor destination.
The Yoredale Rare Breeds Show and Sale, held in Hawes in September, is one of the finest rare breeds events in northern England.
The Dales Countryside Museum, in the former railway station building at the western end of town, covers the history of the Yorkshire Dales from the earliest human occupation through the Viking settlement, the monastic period, the lead mining era and the agricultural changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. The collection includes significant material on the hay meadow farming culture, the lead mining industry and the social history of the dale's communities.
The museum also covers the natural history of the Dales — the geology, the hay meadow ecology, the upland wildlife. It is the best single introduction to what the Dales are and how they came to look the way they do.
The Wensleydale Railway — the line from Northallerton to Garsdale Head, passing through Hawes — closed in 1964. The station building is the Dales Countryside Museum. A preservation society has been working for decades to restore part of the line; a section between Northallerton and Leeming Bar currently operates.
The railway that used to connect Hawes with both the Settle–Carlisle line to the west and the main line to the east represented the last practical rail access to the upper dale. Its closure contributed to the relative isolation of Hawes that makes it the characterful place it is.
Hawes and upper Wensleydale can be explored on a bespoke Yorkshire Dales tour.
