Moors and dales
Jack Thurston journeys by bike along ancient ways and country lanes in the North York Moors discovering heritage railways, moorland plateaus, verdant dales and Roman remains
Eskdale, Rosedale and Wheeldale, North Yorkshire
The River Esk marks the northern edge of the North York Moors. It’s a lush, steep-sided valley fed by becks that tumble down from the moors on either side, carving deep gorges as they go.
Somehow, Victorian railway engineers managed to squeeze a railway line along the valley floor and, even more miraculously, it survived the brutal cuts to Britain’s railway network in the 1960s. But there’s no room for a road, or even a footpath. This makes the valley challenging terrain for human-powered transport.
It feels as though the lanes cross every contour line on the map and go every which way but straight. If they’re not going up, they’re going down, usually at double-figure gradients. After an hour’s riding in the
Esk Valley, it feels like a relief to be on the long, straight roads atop the finger-like ridges of the high moor.
1 VILLAGE HOPPING
The ride starts in the village of Grosmont (pronounced with a silent s). The village has two railways: the Esk Valley line from Middlesbrough to Whitby, and George Stephenson’s line across the moors to Pickering, now run as a heritage railway. The old-fashioned level crossing and the to-ing and fro-ing of steam locos lend the village the atmosphere of bygone times, and it is a good base for exploring the area.
Heading west along the river, a gravel track to Egton Bridge dodges one big hill but soon enough the climbing begins, first on the north side of the valley then up the south side through the village of Glaisdale and up Glaisdale Rigg on to the moorland plateau.
The moors were once dotted with quarries and mines but today the biggest business is grouse shooting. This involves a line of ‘beaters’ blowing whistles and waving flags to chase wild red grouse towards a line of men with guns (and it is almost always men) who are waiting to shoot them as they fly past. Lines of shooting butts – sometimes made of wood, sometimes from stone – are visible from the road. When not in use, the more spacious ones can make for handy shelters for a brew-up or a bivvy.
The landscape of the moors is managed to maximise grouse numbers. Boggy areas are drained, and strips of heather are periodically burned to provide the food and low-level cover that grouse prefer. Environmentalists argue this creates a ‘grouse monoculture’ that increases the risk of wildfires and flooding in valleys, increases carbon emissions and reduces the ecological variety of the uplands. Wild animals that threaten grouse – foxes, stoats, hares and crows – are trapped or shot. The hen harrier, a bird of prey once widespread in Britain, is close to eradication from the uplands.
The big estates challenge all this, arguing that a managed, heather-rich moor that’s good for grouse is also good for other ground-nesting birds, such as golden plover, curlew and lapwing. They say the persecution of hen harriers is the work of a small minority of renegade gamekeepers, and modern moorland management is much more ecologically aware.
People pay thousands of pounds for a single day’s shooting (£75 a grouse is the going rate) and much of this money trickles down into the
“THE LANES CROSS EVERY CONTOUR LINE ON THE MAP AND GO EVERY WAY BUT STRAIGHT”
local economy and provides local employment. It’s a debate that will run and run.
The moorland plateau comes to an abrupt end above Rosedale. It’s hard to imagine now, but from the 1850s to the 1920s a huge iron ore industry grew up here, after the discovery of an abundance of high-grade magnetic ores. The population grew from 558 to nearly 3,000. A railway served the mines and is now a nine-mile walking and off-road cycling route that passes many of the abandoned industrial buildings scattered across the valley. It’s a really rewarding detour if you have time and don’t mind a bit of gravel riding.
The descent into Rosedale Abbey is pretty steep but the climb on the far side of the valley is insane. With an average gradient of 13% and a maximum of 33%, Chimney Bank shares the title of steepest road in England with the Hardknott Pass in
Cumbria, earning its reputation as a chain-breaker.
2 MOORISH VIEWS
Ignoring the siren call of Chimney Bank, the route leaves Rosedale Abbey and follows the valley road down to the Cropton Brewery (tours are available) on the very edge of the Vale of Pickering. From the brewery, it then rounds the site of the Roman camps at Cawthorne, which you can ride to, down a track on the left of the lane. All that remains is earthworks covered in heather but the views across the moors are immense.
3 HIGH LANES
For the return to Grosmont, one option is to ride down to Pickering and hop on a steam train, but to do that would be to miss out on one of the great lost lanes of the North. With the name of Wheeldale Road, it sounds tailor-made for the touring cyclist, but it’s much older than that. There are some remains just off the present route that could be Roman, or an earlier Bronze Age boundary marker, or a medieval trackway. It remains a puzzle. What is incontestable is the solitude and beauty of the road, which fords a couple of streams along the way.
4 DEEP DESCENT
The road just gets better the further along you go, reaching a climax as the dark outline of Whitby Abbey appears in the distance just before the descent back into the deep green ravine of the Esk Valley.
“THE SOLITUDE AND BEAUTY OF THE ROAD IS INCONTESTIBLE”