Walk 49 Rosedale Head, Hamer, Wheeldale Moor and Simon Howe
Walk 50 Eller Beck, Lilla Howe, Jugger Howe Moor and Ravenscar
Appendix 1 Route summary table
Appendix 2 Useful contacts
Sheep grazing has ensured that the dales have been close cropped for centuries
INTRODUCTION
This guidebook offers 50 walks in the varied landscape of the North York Moors National Park. The park was designated in 1952 and covers 1432km2 (553 square miles) of land, comprising the largest continuous expanse of heather moorland in England. The moors are of no great height yet offer a wonderful sense of spaciousness, with extensive views under a ‘big sky’. There are also deep verdant dales where charming scenes and hoary stone buildings can be found, as well as a remarkable cliff coastline designated as the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Heritage Coast. The long-distance Cleveland Way wraps itself around the moors and coast, but there are many other walks that explore the rich variety of the area, focusing on its charm, history, heritage and wildlife.
The walks are distributed through seven regions within the park, enabling walkers to discover and appreciate the Tabular Hills, Hambleton Hills, Cleveland Hills, Northern Moors, High Moors, Eastern Moors and Cleveland Coast. For those who like a challenge, the course of the classic Lyke Wake Walk, crossing the national park from east to west, is also offered, split over a four-day period to allow a leisurely appreciation of the moors. Almost 725km (450 miles) of walking routes are described here, although the national park could furnish you with many more splendid ones from a stock of 1770km (1100 miles) of public footpaths and bridleways.
People have crossed the North York Moors since time immemorial, and some of their routes survive to this day. Stout stone crosses were planted to assist travellers and traders with a safe passage, and these days practically all rights of way are signposted and walkable, although some routes are used far more than others.
Despite having the appearance of a wilderness, this area has often been, and remains to this day, a working landscape. The moors are scarred and quarried in places by man’s search for mineral resources, and the heather cover requires year-round management for the sport of grouse shooting. Walkers with enquiring minds will quickly realise that the human history and settlement of the moors, even at its highest points, stretches back over thousands of years. Our own enjoyment of the moors, in contrast, may be nothing more than a transient pleasure.
Walkers follow an old railway trackbed above Rosedale (Walk 30)
Brief history of the moors
Early settlement
The first people to roam across the North York Moors were Mesolithic nomads, eking out an existence as hunter-gatherers some 10,000 years ago. Swampy lowlands surrounded the uplands, and apart from a few flakes of flint these people left little trace of their existence. Evidence of the Neolithic settlers who followed can be seen in the mounds of stones they heaped over their burial sites, called barrows, which date back to 2000BC. Soon afterwards, from 1800BC onwards, the Beaker People and Bronze Age invaders moved into the area. They used more advanced methods of land clearance and tillage, and buried their dead in conspicuous mounds known as ‘howes’. These people exhausted the land, clearing too much forest too quickly. Minerals leached from the thin soils, so that the uplands became unproductive. Climate changes led to ground becoming waterlogged and mossy, so that tillage became impossible and scrub moorland developed. Iron Age people faced more of a struggle to survive and had to organise themselves in defensive promontory forts. Perhaps some of the linear dykes that cut across the countryside date from that time, although many structures are difficult to date with any degree of certainty.
Roman settlement
The Romans marched through Britain during the first century and founded a city at York. Perhaps the most important site on the North York Moors was Cawthorn Camp near Cropton, which was used as a military training ground. Although Wade’s Causeway in Wheeldale is often referred to as a Roman road, it may not be. Hadrian’s Wall kept the Picts at bay to the north, but the east coast was open to invasion by the Saxons, so the Romans built coastal signal stations in AD368 at Hartlepool, Hunt Cliff, Boulby, Goldsborough, Whitby, Ravenscar, Scarborough, Filey and Flamborough Head. Some of these sites have been lost as the cliffs have receded. By AD410 the Romans had left Britain, and the coast was clear for wave upon wave of invasions.
Dark Age settlement
Saxons, Angles, Danes and other invaders left their mark on the North York Moors, establishing little villages and tilling the land, mostly in the dales, as the higher ground had long since reverted to scrub. Many of these settlers were Christian, and in AD657 a monastery in the Celtic Christian tradition was founded at Whitby. Whitby Abbey was notable for one of its early lay brothers, Caedmon, who was inspired to sing, and whose words comprise the earliest written English Christian verse. During the successive waves of invasion there were times of strife, and the abbey was destroyed in AD867. Other small-scale rural monastic sites are known. Many early Christian churches were simple wooden buildings. Some of the earliest carved stone crosses date from the 10th century.
Lilla Cross is the oldest Christian monument on the moors (Walk 40)
Norman settlement
A more comprehensive invasion was mounted by the Normans, who swept through the region during the 11th century. They totally reorganised society, establishing the feudal system and leaving an invaluable insight into the state of the countryside through the vast numbers of settlements and properties listed in the Domesday Book. In return for allegiance to the king, noblemen were handed vast tracts of countryside and authority over its inhabitants. Resentment and violence was rife for a time, and the new overlords were obliged to build robust castles. Many noblemen gifted large parts of their estates to religious orders from mainland Europe, encouraging them to settle in the area.
Monastic settlement
Monasteries and abbeys were founded in and around the North York Moors in the wake of the Norman invasion, and ruins dating from the 12th and 13th centuries still dominate the countryside. Stone quarrying was important at this time, and large-scale sheep rearing was developed, leading to the large, close-cropped pastures that feature in the dales. There were still plenty of woodlands for timber and hunting, but the moors remained bleak and barren and were reckoned to be of little worth. Early maps and descriptions by travellers simply dismissed the area as ‘black-a-moor’, yet it was necessary for people to cross the moors if only to get from place to place, and so a network of paths developed. The monasteries planted some of the old stone crosses on the moors to provide guidance to travellers. This era came to a sudden close with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century.
Recent settlement
Over the past few centuries the settlement of the North York
