The cobbles come first. Dent's main street is paved with them, running narrow between whitewashed cottages, and at the top of it stands the Sun Inn, which has been there for over three hundred years. It does not serve food. What it serves is real cask ale — some of it brewed by Dent Brewery a short way up the valley — poured in a room with an open fire and beams studded with old coins. There is no television, no jukebox, no fruit machine. People come here to drink and to talk, and the pub has arranged itself entirely around that idea.
If you want the second option, the George & Dragon sits in the centre of the village and pulls in the same crowd of walkers and cyclists. Between the two pubs, the cobbled streets carry a handful of independent shops, an art gallery, and a blacksmith's.
Set into those same cobbles is a granite fountain, a memorial to Adam Sedgwick. He was born here in 1785, became Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, and is counted among the founders of the modern science. He knew Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, taught the young Charles Darwin, and later spent a good part of his life arguing against him. For a village this small to produce one of geology's founding fathers is a lot to ask of it, and Dent did it anyway.
St Andrew's has stood since the 12th century. Its altar flagstones are cut from Dent Marble, the black limestone quarried locally and used for decorative work across the north of England. The same stone, in the same church, quietly.
Dent was also once famous for knitting. In the 18th and 19th centuries the whole village — men, women and children — hand-knitted stockings and garments at speed, earning the name the "Terrible Knitters of Dent." Terrible, in the old sense, meant terribly fast.
The walking is the reason most people come. The valley floor gives you flat, easy going along the River Dee through Dentdale. For something harder, Whernside rises to 736 metres, the highest of the Yorkshire Three Peaks, reached from the dale. On the way up you pass under the Settle–Carlisle Railway viaducts at Dent Head and Arten Gill, two of the more dramatic railway structures in England, striding across the fellside on tall stone arches.
There is a Dent Station, though the name is generous. It sits four miles from the village on open moor, the highest mainline station in England at 350 metres, with trains to Leeds and Carlisle. The bus link to it is very limited, which is a polite way of saying you should drive — the usual approach is via Sedbergh, four miles off, then the Dentdale road. Rise Hill and Whernside close in the valley on either side, so wherever you park, the fells are looking down at you.
The village calls itself one of the most picturesque in the Dales, and does so from inside Cumbria, since that is where it is administered from despite sitting squarely within the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It has been on the wrong side of a county line and got on with it regardless.
