The floorless lake
GORMIRE & SUTTON BANK
Shaped like a kidney pool, ringed by tangled forest, and said to be bottomless: myth runs deep at Gormire Lake. Legend tells a witch jumped in and resurfaced in a well nine miles away; a goose went in and emerged a dozen miles later at Kirkbymoorside, minus feathers. The lake might hide a drowned village. It might be the gate to hell.
And it is curious. Cradled in a glacial hollow at the foot of the Hambleton Hills, Gormire has no obvious inflow or outflow of water: it’s thought to be fed by an underground spring and drained by a limestone channel. Cliffs layer high at its eastern shore, like a 500-foot thick textbook to the Jurassic, cropping out from the treetops at Whitestone Cliff, aka White Mare Crag. Sir Harry de Scriven rode this poor pale steed over the edge, chased by the abbot of Rievaulx astride a black horse. Harry was dashed on the rocks, but the abbot sprouted horns, hooves and a forked tail, boiling the water as he plunged through Gormire to the underworld.
A short trot along the view-laden scarp of Sutton Bank and you’ll see the Kilburn White Horse goes large on the equine theme. This 220-foot tall charger was cut from the sandstone in 1857, its body whitened with lime, and it stands just below the rim of a huge, 5000 year old hillfort at Roulston Scar. This autumn also marks 700 years since the Battle of Byland, when Scotland’s Robert the Bruce whupped the forces of King Edward II, despite the English having the high ground advantage atop Sutton Bank.
WALK HERE: Find a Gormire route at walk1000miles.co.uk/bonusroutes
‘Cradled in a glacial hollow at the foot of the Hambleton Hills, Gormire has no obvious inflow or outflow of water…’