[1] Take the narrow way-marked track to the east side of the bridge (SD952982) with Gunnerside Beck on your left. Walk upstream, skirting right around the higher house’s boundary before rejoining the track and rising gradually above the Beck. Passing through scrubby woodland, the first old working is soon reached – a grassy embankment on your right. A slim handgate takes the path onto a ledged way, through a second gate and up thicker woodland (care needed as path may be muddy in places). Beyond a sleeper bridge, through a squeeze stile and a gate, the path breaks free of woodland into a flat valley bottom, commencing an easy amble into the developing gorge of Gunnerside Gill. The first substantial ruins, Sir Francis Level, are soon reached.
[2] Cross a wooden stile and follow path up to a dry stone wall then turn left with the wall on your right. Over a stile, leave the valley floor and start a gradual climb across the valleyside – the is route soon marked by a sinuous old wall on your left. On the opposite flank is the wooded Botcher Gill – a series of slender waterfalls leaping down from the heights of Black Hill. The sheer gorge sides are fanned with the detritus of the pleasingly named Dolly Lead Level, where higher buildings mark the sites of adits (mine shafts) and crushing floors. Crossing a gushing side beck, you arrive at the substantial site of the Bunton complex.
The wheelpit on the very edge of the gorge housed a waterwheel that helped drain the underground workings, which were dug around 1800. The line of semi-circular bunkers once held raw ore, prior to crushing in the dressing floor complex here. ‘Dressed’ ore was then moved through the nearby slim tunnel beneath the moors to the formidable Old Gang smelters, more than a mile away.
[3] Walk 150m to a four-way fingerpost and turn right for Surrender Bridge, commencing a steep climb up a stony hush. This levels out into a startling area of spoil, tips and old shafts, more like the lunar surface than the Yorkshire Dales. Keep ahead to join a moorland track. Bear right and trace this through the eerie landscape, passing a fenced off mine shaft on the right, a rusting stone crusher on the left, then a series of Grouse Butts. Remain on the track for nearly a mile as it starts to fall towards Old Gang Beck valley.
[4] At a small cairn turn right and head up along a firm gravel track. Within 200m you’ll walk through an area of old walled sheep pens, beside a ruined building: Moor House. Past here, the track rolls easily across heather-clad grouse moors. At a fork, keep right go through a concrete watersplash and follow the track, passing beside a long series of grouse butts, to where Swaledale comes into view ahead.
[5] Around 150m past the final butt, the track bends sharply right. Fork left here onto the grassier track, which shortly curls right to reveal a stone barn and tarred lane in the near distance. Take a right fork and head for the barn down another grassy track. Near the barn, turn left through a gate in a wall to join the tarred lane and follow it down to Gunnerside, which nestles amid Swaledale’s stunning hay meadows.