Lancashire family photography: Bowland, the Ribble Valley & Pendle Hill

Lancashire: The Forest of Bowland & the Ribble Valley

Lancashire is one of England's most scenically undervalued counties — its reputation defined by the coastal factory towns of the nineteenth century while its interior landscape, the Forest of Bowland and the Ribble Valley, remains one of England's best-kept rural secrets. The Forest of Bowland — designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1964, covering 800 square kilometres of fell, moorland, river valley, and ancient woodland — is genuinely unknown to most visitors from outside the north-west: the English equivalent of the French 'empty quarter'. Its combination of remoteness, pastoral valley character, and upland fell drama provides family photography settings that have no precise equivalent in southern England. For family portrait photography, Lancashire's landscape is ideal: the scale and freedom of the AONB, the meadow-floored river valleys, and the dramatic moorland ridges of Pendle and Ward's Stone all reward sessions that are structured as walks rather than static set-pieces.

The Forest of Bowland

The Forest of Bowland is not forest in the woodland sense — like Dartmoor or New Forest, the term 'forest' denotes its medieval designation as a royal hunting ground. The AONB comprises open moorland and fell (the high ground of Ward's Stone at 561m, Fair Snape Fell, Longridge Fell), the valley systems of the Hodder, Loud, and Calder rivers, and the enclosed upland pasture of the townships. The Trough of Bowland — a valley pass through the fell moorland connecting the Lancashire plain to the Lune Valley — is the most dramatic single landscape feature: a winding road through open moorland, with the river Marshaw Wyre below and the rounded moorland skyline above. The Dunsop Bridge valley, the Hodder at Newton, and the upper Ribble meadows near Settle (just inside Yorkshire) are the most popular family portrait settings in the AONB. The area has England's largest breeding hen harrier population — rare enough that a sighting during a portrait session is genuinely memorable.

The Ribble Valley

The Ribble Valley — centred on the market town of Clitheroe with its Norman keep on a limestone crag — is Lancashire's most accessible rural landscape and its most photogenic combined town-and-countryside setting. The valley meadows along the Ribble between Ribchester and Clitheroe are at their finest in June–July when the traditional hay meadows of the valley floor are at full flower — cowslips, ragged robin, orchids in the unimproved meadows of the upper valley. The ruins of Whalley Abbey occupy the Ribble flood plain below Clitheroe: the fourteenth-century gatehouse and the nave walls of the Cistercian abbey in the valley setting provide ecclesiastical ruin portrait settings of considerable atmospheric power. Pendle Hill — the moorland ridge above the valley — is visible as a constant horizon feature throughout the valley landscape, its profile the most recognisable skyline in Lancashire.

Silverdale & Morecambe Bay

The Silverdale and Arnside AONB on Morecambe Bay — where Lancashire meets Cumbria in a landscape of limestone pavement, ancient ash woodland, coastal saltmarsh, and the vast inter-tidal geography of the Bay — is among England's most distinctive costal portrait environments. The Bay's tidal range (one of the largest in Europe, up to 10 metres) creates a constantly changing relationship between land and sea: at low tide, the Bay's sand and mudflat extends for miles, with the Lakeland mountains visible on the northern horizon. Humphrey Head, the limestone headland at the Bay's southern shore, and the tidal salt marsh at Silverdale provide portrait settings that range from intimate woodland to vast horizontal coastal landscape. The light over Morecambe Bay at sunset — the western sky over the Irish Sea, the Lakeland silhouette to the north — is one of England's finest evening light environments for portrait photography.