Labrador Penny hauled to safety from waterfall gorge in Yorkshire Dales

A yellow Labrador named Penny has been brought back to solid ground after spending hours marooned on a sliver of rock at the foot of a waterfall in the Yorkshire Dales. The eight-year-old dog was found stranded on a narrow ledge partway down a 40ft (12m) cliff face beside Pecca Falls, near Ingleton, after a tumble into the river below left her stranded well above the waterline.

Volunteers from the Cave Rescue Organisation (CRO), a Yorkshire Dales-based mountain and cave rescue charity, joined forces with North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service to carry out the recovery. The incident was reported at 15:15 BST on Saturday, and photographs released by the charity show a rescuer in waterproof clothing and climbing equipment being lowered on ropes down the wet rock face, Penny cradled in his arms as he descended.

The circumstances of Penny's predicament were particularly awkward for the rescue team. She had gone into the fast-flowing river at the base of the falls but had managed to scramble up onto a rocky outcrop roughly 6.5ft (2m) above the water, where she was effectively trapped: too high for her to safely drop back into the gorge, and set against a near-vertical wall too sheer for her to climb any higher. The answer, organisers said, was to build a rope system down to the ledge, take the dog off it and haul her back up the gorge.

Support came from the fire service's Ripon swiftwater rescue team, which positioned itself downstream of the location where Penny was stranded. Their presence underlines one of the central difficulties of any rescue in a gorge environment: the hazard does not stop at the point where the casualty is reached. Water in a beck or river gorge can rise, change colour as sediment washes into it, or push a person or animal into rocks that look harmless when the water is low. Controlling the environment below and around the dog was as much a part of the operation as reaching her.

Once the volunteer reached the ledge, Penny was secured and raised back up the gorge, where she was reunited with her owners. Images supplied by the Cave Rescue Organisation show the dog looking none the worse for wear after her ordeal, having been carried down a cliff face that would have been well beyond the reach of an untrained rescuer working alone.

Pecca Falls is one of the better-known sights in the Ingleton area, a sequence of five cascades that drop by more than 30m (98ft) in total, and it attracts substantial numbers of visitors throughout the year. Waterfalls of this kind are a particular draw for dog owners, and the terrain around them — wet, steep, uneven and often undercut — is unforgiving if an animal slips or takes a bad step into a torrent.

This was not the first time the charity has had to recover a pet from the same site. In March, the CRO team used a similar rope and pulley system to free a dog that had fallen 26.2ft (8m) and also ended up stuck on a narrow ledge. That repeat visit has prompted suggestions that the falls, while beautiful, present a recurring danger to animals, and that visitors with dogs should consider keeping them on leads near the water and the gorge edges.

The Cave Rescue Organisation is based in Clapham and covers the Yorkshire Dales National Park, with its reach extending into Lancashire and Cumbria. It was formed in 1935 and today relies on more than 80 volunteers, who regularly attend mountain and cave rescues and are also called out to assist with other public service incidents. As a volunteer-run outfit, its capacity to respond to incidents exactly like the one at Ingleton depends entirely on people who have trained extensively in rope work, first aid and, in this case, operating safely around moving water.

The Yorkshire Dales terrain offers no shortcuts. Rock faces, peat bogs, caves and narrow gorges are the environment in which the CRO's volunteers routinely work, and their case history includes rescues well outside the conventional remit of a dog-walking mishap — among recent operations were a dog trapped underground for six hours, and a terrier pulled from a rabbit hole after two days.

The weekend's callout also drew a reminder that the same scenery brings risks to people, not only pets, with reports of walkers suffering falls on rocks at Yorkshire beauty spots. For Penny, however, the outcome was straightforward: a rope, a pair of steady hands and a fire service team securing the water below meant that a soaking Saturday walk ended with a safe reunion rather than a far more serious ending.

The BBC has not been told whether any further action is planned in light of the repeated incidents at Pecca Falls, and both the Cave Rescue Organisation and North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service were contacted for this report. Additional photographs from the operation have been published by the charity.