History

The area opposite the Royalty Public House on Yorkgate is locally known as The Chevin (containing Surprise View) and is an integral part of the larger Chevin Forest Park. Located at the western end of the forest, it rises to a height of approximately 814ft and overlooks the market town of Otley with magnificent views of the Wharfe Valley.
The rock formations of The Chevin are all of carboniferous age. More specifically, they belong to the Millstone Grit Group consisting of gritty sandstones interbedded with shale formations, which were laid down as sediment in a tropical delta around 315 million years ago. At that time, the region lay in an equatorial rain belt of a super-continent, which had a polar ice cap over its southern extremities. The delta was located over northern England and the North Sea and was formed by rivers flowing out of a mountain land, which millions of years later were split apart by the rifting which produced the North Atlantic Ocean.
The delta was covered in lush tropical forest periodically submerged by rising sea levels resulting from melting of the southern ice-cap. The gritstone layers forming The Chevin were deposited by a river with strong and shifting currents. They have given rise to a distinctive 'cross-bedding', which can be seen in many gritstone outcrops on The Chevin and especially in Caley Crags in the eastern Chevin Forest Park.

At the end of the Carboniferous Period around 310 million years ago, continental collisions crumpled and stacked up rock layers in southern England. Stresses reached northern England, compressing the contents of the rift-like sedimentary basins, like our local Craven Basin, in which the Carboniferous sediments had accumulated. Older deeper rock layers were arched upwards - you can see this in the Skipton Quarries. The younger overlying layers of Millstone Grit slope away from them southwards beneath the Yorkshire Coalfield, forming a long scarp from Harewood to Addingham Edge of which The Chevin is a portion made prominent by the Guiseley Gap. On The Chevin itself, bands of shale with marine fossils give place upwards to sandy delta deposits, reflecting the periodic rise and fall of sea levels.
30 million years ago, the Earth's climate began to cool and ice caps formed at the poles. A huge shift in North Atlantic currents brought the Ice Age to Britain 1½ - 2 million years ago. At various times, the warming Gulf Stream flowed east to Lisbon and turned south, leaving Britain lying in the path of ice-cold polar currents. Ice-sheets built up on land to great thicknesses, though in Wharfedale we only have evidence of the last great advance, which took place around 20,000 years ago. At this time, all the main Dales contained glaciers; the Wharfedale Glacier extended as far east as Arthington and at its maximum may have surrounded The Chevin. An arm of the glacier flowed through the Guiseley Gap to Airedale, leaving debris in the form of moraine and of boulder clay moulded into oval mounds known as drumlins above Menston. As the ice retreated, large landslips affected the north face of the Millstone Grit scarp, especially at Ilkley and on The Chevin at Great Dib.

The Dales existed as river valleys before the Ice Age, though the moving ice undoubtedly widened and deepened them. The original rivers flowed eastwards as now, cutting down through kilometres-thick layers of Jurassic and Cretaceous rock like those in East Yorkshire, which you can see on the north-east horizon, before carving into the Dales rocks. These layers have been stripped away from the Dales in the past 60 million years, since the North Atlantic began to open.
Woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros - the greatest of the Ice Age mammals - might once have roamed the tundra above the glaciers. We do know that a rich fauna, including wild horse, red deer, giant ox and wild pig, browsed on pastures established after the ice melted 10,000 years ago. They were hunted by Palaeolithic hunter - gatherers, possibly overlapping with the establishment of pastoralism and agriculture in the late Neolithic around 5,000 years ago.
Comprising of woodland, massive rock outcrops and many walks, The Chevin caters for the rambler, picnickers, horseriders, cyclists, climbers or those just looking for peace and quiet.

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