THE next phase in the creation of a National Trail across the Yorkshire Dales has begun with a huge helicopter airlift of more than 3,000 tonnes of stone.

Staff at the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority (YDNPA) have started the latest stage of the Pennine Bridleway which will eventually stretch from Derbyshire to Northumberland along ancient packhorse trade routes and drove roads connected by new links.

The bridleway, funded by the Countryside Agency with a £1.8m grant from Sport England, covers about 350 miles in total, of which 52 miles run through the Yorkshire Dales National Park from Long Preston in the south to Hell Gill Bridge on the Yorkshire/Cumbria border.

The next phase of the operation centres on the Malham Loop off the main route of the Pennine Bridleway and involves more than 3,500 tonnes of stone being airlifted out to Gorbeck Road and the Stockdale bridleways on Malham Moor during the next few weeks. There it will be crushed to form an aggregate base to repair a 6km section of track that has become deeply rutted and virtually impassable.

The 16km loop, starting and finishing in Settle, stretches east to Grizedales and will be open later this year, ahead of schedule, to provide a day trip excursion for horse-riders, mountain-bikers and walkers.

The YDNPA's Pennine Bridleway project officer Gareth Evans, who has been responsible for all the work so far, said: "It is a huge job because of the scale of erosion to the track surface and to surrounding, fragile moorland. There is a lot of work involved before we start building the authority has already undertaken archaeological and ecological surveys along the line of the route.

"As a direct result of this survey work, we have excavated the remains of what are believed to be three 18th Century culverts."