Guide · Wildlife & Landscape Yorkshire Dales
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Everyone who visits Malham goes to the Cove. Far fewer carry on up onto the moor above it to Malham Tarn — a broad, shallow, glacially formed lake sitting high on the limestone plateau, and one of the most unusual bodies of water in England.
Most upland lakes are acidic. Malham Tarn is the opposite: its water rises through limestone and arrives lime-rich and alkaline, making it a rare example of an upland marl lake — and that unusual chemistry supports plant and invertebrate life that ordinary tarns cannot. The tarn and the wetlands around it are a National Nature Reserve in the care of the National Trust.
The reserve is more than open water. On the tarn's fringes lie fen and raised bog — Tarn Fen and Tarn Moss — threaded by a boardwalk that lets you walk out into habitat that would otherwise be impassable and, frankly, unwise to attempt. In summer the fen is a botanist's day out: sedges, marsh flowers and insect life in profusion, with dragonflies hunting the boardwalk line.
The open water holds great crested grebe in the breeding season and gathers wildfowl in autumn and winter. Around the shores and the plantations, the birdlife shifts with the seasons — and above it all is the wide, bright, treeless light of the limestone uplands, entirely different in character from the wooded valleys below.
Malham Tarn has a literary footnote that surprises people. Charles Kingsley stayed at Tarn House on the northern shore in the 1850s, and the landscape around the tarn and the Cove is credited with helping inspire The Water-Babies — his strange, moralising Victorian fantasy of a chimney sweep transformed into a water spirit. Local tradition even offers an origin for the Cove's dark streaks in the story of little Tom's sooty descent. Tarn House itself is now a field studies centre, and generations of students have learned their ecology on this shore.
The tarn sits a couple of miles above Malham Cove, and the water that leaves it disappears underground before re-emerging below the Cove — classic limestone behaviour of the kind we've described in our article on the Dales' limestone pavements. Tarn, cove, pavement and Gordale Scar together make one of the great half-days in northern England: the whole limestone story, told in a single small area.
May–July — the fen in flower, grebes on the water, upland birds on the surrounding pasture.
Autumn and winter — wildfowl on the tarn, empty paths, and the plateau's austere beauty at its most striking. Dress for weather; this is high, open country.
Can you walk around Malham Tarn?
There are good paths and tracks along parts of the shore, including the boardwalk through the fen; a wider circuit is possible for those who want it. The boardwalk section is level and family-friendly.
Why is a marl lake special?
Because lime-rich upland lakes are genuinely rare. The alkaline water changes everything about what can live there, from the plants on the bottom to the insects above it — a completely different ecosystem from an ordinary acidic tarn.
Is it worth it if I'm short of time at Malham?
If you have only an hour, see the Cove. If you have a day, the tarn is what turns Malham from a single spectacle into a landscape you actually understand.
Malham Tarn, the Cove and Gordale Scar make a natural bespoke Dales day — limestone, wildlife and one very odd Victorian novel. Ask us to build it.
Its water rises through limestone and arrives lime-rich and alkaline, making it a rare upland marl lake, unlike most acidic upland tarns.
Charles Kingsley stayed at Tarn House on the northern shore, a stay linked to his novel The Water-Babies.
Fen and raised bog — Tarn Fen and Tarn Moss — accessible via a boardwalk through otherwise impassable ground.