The Howgills sit roughly within a triangle formed by the town of Sedbergh in the south and the villages of Ravenstonedale and Tebay in the north. The River Lune defines their western edge, where the M6 motorway threads through the Lune Gorge - itself a major glacial meltwater channel cut during the last ice age. To the east lies the River Rawthey, beyond which rise the limestone country of the Yorkshire Dales proper. Two summits qualify as Marilyns - hills with at least 150 metres of prominence. The Calf reaches 2,218 feet (676 metres) and is the highest point in the range. Yarlside follows at 2,096 feet. Five further peaks are Hewitts. Cautley Crag, on the east-facing slope of the range, is the only well-developed glacial cirque - everywhere else the ice flowed across the smooth tops rather than carving cliffs out of them.

The oldest rocks in the Howgills are Ordovician slates in the vicinity of Backside Beck in the east - around 445 million years old. The oldest Silurian rocks here are the laminated siltstones of the Stockdale Group, laid down in what was then a deep marine basin. Above these come more than 250 metres of dark grey mudstones and siltstones of the Brathay Formation. The larger part of the range is built from the sandstones of the Coniston Group, roughly a kilometre thick in total. These were folded into a broad east-west anticline and syncline during a Caledonian mountain-building event when continents collided. Then, much later, the British ice sheet rolled across them during successive glaciations, smoothing the tops, leaving glacial till in the valleys, and dumping debris cones in the side valleys of Langdale and Bowderdale. Cautley Spout cuts down through scree along this margin in a series of dramatic falls.

The word Howgill is Old Norse: haugr meaning a hill or barrow, and gil meaning a narrow valley. The Norse settled the western fells of northern England heavily in the ninth and tenth centuries - their place names cluster across Cumbria more densely than almost anywhere else outside Iceland. A howgill is the kind of place where you have both elements at once - a rounded hill cut through by a sharp ravine - and it described what these settlers found here exactly. Every steep-sided beck cutting down from The Calf or Yarlside fits the description. The naming has held for more than a thousand years; the landscape has held for considerably longer. The fells were grazed by Norse, Cumbric and Anglo-Saxon sheep over the centuries, and they are still grazed - the close-cropped turf that gives the range its smooth appearance is a thousand-year cultural artefact as much as it is a geological one.

Alfred Wainwright wrote about the Howgills with the affection of a man who had grown tired of crowds on Helvellyn. The walking is different here from the Lake District: less rocky scrambling, more sustained climbing on grass and bracken slopes, with long ridge walks linking summit to summit once you gain the height. Weather can change fast at this latitude. Maritime air from the Irish Sea collides with northern continental fronts, and what looks like a clear summer morning becomes a cloud-wrapped fell by lunchtime. Peat is found on some hill spurs but is not extensively developed - which means the going is firm in most weather, an unusual mercy in this part of England. Since 2017 the entire range has been formally part of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and visitor numbers have started to climb. The Howgills have been waiting.