Built in 1861, Smardale Viaduct strides across the secluded valley of Scandal Beck on fourteen great sandstone arches. Designed by Sir Thomas Bouch for the South Durham & Lancashire Union Railway, it formed part of a remarkable route carrying coke west from County Durham to the iron and steel furnaces of Furness, while limestone travelled east towards Durham. The contrasting cargoes gave the railway its evocative local nickname — the “Black and White Line”.

Built in 1861 by contractor Henry Wrigg to the design of Sir Thomas Bouch, the Grade II listed viaduct carries its fourteen sandstone arches for 168 metres across Scandal Beck, rising about 27 metres above the valley. The railway has long since vanished, but the viaduct survived and today forms part of Smardale Gill National Nature Reserve. Walkers can now cross the very arches that once carried heavy mineral trains through this quiet Cumbrian valley.

The warm sandstone of Smardale Viaduct was quarried locally, close to the railway on the opposite side of Scandal Beck. From there, enormous quantities of stone had to be cut, moved and raised into the fourteen arches by the gangs of labourers known as navvies. Many lived in temporary huts beside the beck while construction continued through this isolated valley. Little remains of their settlement today, but the great sandstone arches they built still dominate Smardale more than 160 years later.

Beside the old railway stand the remains of two mid-19th-century lime kilns, built close to the limestone quarries that supplied them. Limestone was burned here to produce quicklime, once widely used for improving farmland, building mortar and other industrial purposes. Now protected as a Scheduled Monument, the weathered stonework is slowly being absorbed into the vegetation — a surviving fragment of the industry that once filled this peaceful valley with quarrying, smoke and railway traffic.

On the east bank of Scandal Beck, near Smardale Bridge, the abandoned sandstone quarry provided stone used in the construction of Smardale Viaduct. Cut deeply into the hillside, the old workings include a striking cavern blasted into the rock — a reminder of the immense quantities of local stone required to build the railway through Smardale. Today the quarry is quiet and overgrown, but its sandstone still stands high above the valley in the arches of the viaduct.

Through Smardale Gill National Nature Reserve, the former railway trackbed provides an unusually level, hard-surfaced route through the valley, suitable for wheelchair access. The good surface continues along the old railway towards Newbiggin-on-Lune, making this an exceptionally accessible way to experience the secluded landscape of Smardale. With woodland, limestone grassland and Scandal Beck alongside, the trains may have disappeared, but their remarkably level path through the valley has become one of the pleasures of walking here.

The old railway continues for about four miles from Smardale Hall towards Newbiggin-on-Lune, carrying the walker through an increasingly gentle landscape. Beyond the nature reserve, the track is especially attractive in early summer, when flowering trees, wayside herbs and wildflowers crowd its margins. What was engineered as a route for heavy mineral trains has become a quiet green corridor through the countryside — one of those places where the railway has vanished, but the landscape it created continues to flourish.