Hawes

• Wander the town centre: stone-built streets, a market square, traditional shops and independent food producers, including local preserves and a long cheese-making tradition rooted in milk from surrounding family farms.
• The old railway station at the edge of town now houses the Dales Countryside Museum and the National Park visitor centre, where staff hand out leaflets and walk advice.
• Short walks: routes head out towards Sedbusk and Hardraw, or south to Aysgill Force, giving you waterfalls and hay meadows within an easy outing.
• The Hawes Mosaic Walk: a circular route of roughly 10.8 miles taking about 4.5 hours, low-level for most of its length, taking in 20 community mosaics. It splits neatly into shorter sections if you do not want the full day.
• Local extras: the auction mart is worth a look for a glimpse of working farming, and a small local bus service runs to the Snaizeholme red squirrel trail.

The National Park car park sits by the museum and has public toilets, including a RADAR toilet, blue-badge bays, a small picnic area and an electric car charger. There is a Changing Places toilet in the museum. A second pay-and-display car park sits in the town centre.

From the National Park car park there is a short accessible walk of up to two miles, mostly low-level, though it includes a cobbled section at a 1:7 gradient and a run of stone flags around a metre wide, with a rest area along the way. The stroll from town to the creamery is short, under a kilometre, but expect pavements, cobbles and a few gradients.

The car park is also a Dark Sky Discovery site, which makes Hawes a reasonable place to end a day if you want a look at the night sky.

• It gets busy, particularly in school holidays and on market days, and parking in the centre fills up first.
• Hawes is a small town, so this is a couple of hours of pottering plus a walk rather than a full day in itself.
• Cobbles, gradients and narrow footways mean the streets are not uniformly easy going, whatever the marked accessible route offers.
• Opening arrangements for individual shops, cafes and attractions can vary through the year, so check before you rely on any one of them.

It is also a practical base for the western dales. Waterfall walks, the Wensleydale Creamery and the Dales Countryside Museum are all within a short distance, and buses and lanes radiate out from the centre.