There’s only a couple of serious gradients but the rest of the ‘up’ is continuous and challenging. It drains you but the camaraderie helps to combat the breathlessness and the knowledge that its good for the heart is encouraging.

I’m heading to Swainby from York so its a relatively early start. The weather is on our side though and the summer rain that had been making the ground slimy through the night has stopped but the evidence is still there.

    The walk is about 5 miles and beautiful. As it turns out we missed the intense colours of the heather by about 10 days. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve caught it as I’ve travelled to Whitby over the previous three weeks and it has been a magnificent display. No matter though, the ridge and the track take us along one of the most picturesque in Yorkshire with clear views of the Vale of Mowbray stretching out like a patchwork quilt of fields and hedges towards the Pennines. The damp ground has attracted a slight mist that doesn’t obscure the spine of the country but it does soften the detail.

    The beautiful, rural idyll, so peaceful now has seen some pretty dire times only a few hundred years ago. In the 11th century, William had been having some trouble with the natives in this region. It should be noted that all the counties north of the Humber where referred to as Northumberland and the language in Yorkshire would have been hard to understand in the South (a bit like today really!) Anyway, the aristocracy and landowners in the region below us were of Scandinavian origin or certainly with Scandinavian genes and were pretty unimpressed with William and his French cronies thinking he could take the Northern tribes so he needed to prove his point and he did it with a vengeance. He sent his armies north with orders to ‘raze the towns and villages to the ground’. This they did and threw in a scorched earth policy to boot. They tortured, raped and murdered as they looted the villages then set fire to buildings and crops. There was mass starvation for those that temporarily survived and managed to get their wives and children into the forests and hills and all of this happened a thousand feet below on the tranquil plane that’s currently bathed in sunshine.

That’s only in our time though. Millions of years before that it was a huge lake that stretched down to York and beyond, hence the flat plane that we now recognise. It would be populated with all kinds of prehistoric animals and fish together with woods and vegetation that’s rotted down to produce the wonderful fertile land that our farmers use to such advantage.

All of the above is buzzing through my head as we make our way up through Live Moor Plantation. There are rugged steps through the wood and the rise is over 300 feet in only a few hundred yards so we stop a couple of times to catch our breath.

Through the gate and onto Live Moor proper takes us on a much less steep path carefully paved by volunteers and stretching up into the distance. The ferns have definitely been busy through the night catching and storing the rain so that an accidental brush past their fronds results in heavy wet patches across our jeans. A little further up and it’s rocky moorland largely covered in the heather that we’re looking forward to seeing but sadly, has just gone over although there is still evidence of what it was like a couple of weeks ago.

    Down to our left is Whorl Hill carefully planted with conifers in 1953 as Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was being transformed from Princess to Queen as the final words of her vows were being uttered in the Abbey Church of St. Peter:

”The things which I have here before promised, I will perform, and keep.” 

…and she did!

There is a secret on Whorl Hill’s eastern side where, in winter, when the larch have dropped their needles, the letters ‘E – R’ reveal themselves via a number of spruce trees carefully planted by the foresters who were responsible for the wood.

We’re halfway through the walk now and the terrain is flattening when we arrive at a cairn that’s not really a cairn and a small sign asks us to treat it with respect as it is a bronze age grave so we’re not to add stones to it. It feels odd to be up here in the middle of nowhere reading about bronze age men who were burying their dead in this bleak place thousands of years ago.

    The rest of the track has been well maintained and the views continue to delight although the wind has certainly begun to make its presence felt; however, it has encouraged the clouds to vacate our part of the skies and reveal some beautiful, welcome blue after an hour and half of grey. 

A half-hour from Lordstones and we split into two groups. One takes the right fork that will steer them around the trig point and onto a less demanding lane to the rewards of the cafe.  We take the higher route to the trig point where we can wallow in the views of the Vale and onwards to Teesside and the long panorama of the Pennines. We also get the delightful silhouette of Roseberry in the far distance.

    We make our way down the steep steps towards the top of Carlton Bank and see the other group well in front but the trig point route is by far superior and I would recommend it unless you have issues with heights or steps.

    Lordstones Cafe is well worth a visit. We tend to find ourselves here as a start point, endpoint or middle point and the latter two cases, usually end up with an excellent bacon bun. Recommended.

Feel free to share or comment, I love comments…G..x

  We exercise our old farts passes and take the excellent Abbotts service from Northallerton to Swainby and within a few minutes we’re heading up Shepherds Hill the cross roads of the Cleveland Way and an abrupt turn right later we’re raising our heart rate on the steps towards Osmotherley. In the early years these would have required four or five stops out of necessity to regaining control of breathing and, if I’m frank, to remain upright. Whilst it would be wrong to imply that we’re now capable of jogging to the top, we do find that the one stop that we do make is more to do with the opportunity to take photographs and less to do with necessity; it really does feel good!

We’ve walked about a mile and the ViewRanger app is telling me that the elevation is approximately 250 metres (800 feet) the walk up on Shepherds Hill that preceded the steps is a good warm-up. We take a short break at the top to sit on the strategically placed bench seats that look out over the Vale of Mowbray towards Teesside then beyond to the coast and beautiful Durham.

  The track leads to a cattle grid where we make the decision to continue along the road to Sheepwash and onwards to the Drovers Road where huge herds of cattle would be brought from the Highlands of Scotland through the counties of the beautiful but unforgiving counties of Northern England and onward to the markets of East Anglia, the Midlands and onward to London. There are records indicating an average speed of 2 miles per hour which is remarkable if you consider that we don’t achieve much more than that if you include breaks.

We walk for twenty minutes and George calls a short break as he confirms our route across the moor proper. We don’t normally go off-piste but on this occasion, we need to shorten the walk by a couple of miles and there is the remnants of a track that we have used before. To our right running North West is Bad Lane which we have used before and is quite overgrown; however, to our left running South East is what we want to follow and it makes Bad Lane look positively defined.

    We turn left through the gate and begin our orienteering work along Solomon’s Lane. It really isn’t clear but there’s are remnants of a drystone wall from time to time and plenty of boggy water which is not surprising after the deluge of the last three weeks. This element of the walk is tougher than track walking and we have to pick our way carefully as the heather covered troughs are full of peaty water that isn’t deep enough to be dangerous but is definitely deep enough to render you uncomfortable for the rest of the walk.

This yomp is about 2km (over a mile) and takes in very few landmarks save grouse butts and a tiny copse but the track has occasional evidence of its previous existence in the form of a dry stone wall that is slowly being subsumed into the moor by lichen, gorse, and heather.

    At the intersection of the two tracks, we take a break for lunch and take the opportunity to appreciate the vastness of the moor. The wind has dropped and the sound of the birds becomes evident and the next few minutes is spent in near silence as we enjoy the sounds of the moor and the taste our sandwiches.

We turn left on the new track and head North, North East towards the Gamekeeper’s Lodge. It’s easy walking now although there has been three weeks of torrential rain the moors have done a sterling job of draining it and we don’t have to spend so much time concentrating where our next foot should fall. Each bluff exposes more moor and we eventually see the Lodge on the moor horizon and we exchange this for the Bilsdale Mast which has been one of our triangulation for our location until now. For info, I do use an app on my phone which will show our position to within a couple of metres but it only gets used for verification so we don’t lose our ability to navigate should there be any failure on behalf of technology.

The Gamekeeper’s lodge is also a marker for a fork in the track. It’s another 100 metres or so North and we take the left-hand fork that takes us due North and then North, North West towards Swainby. It’s a clear day so we’re expecting to see Whorl Hill at the foot of the wonderfully named Scugdale and within a couple of kilometres it shows itself as we begin to descend.

    I always like this view. I worked in Teesside for twenty-five years and its reputation for pollution is well out of date but, sadly,  it is maintained by the slang name of Smoggies to label Teessiders and is neither funny or appropriate. I would urge you to have a look at the Teesside towns and explore the banks of the Tees where huge investment has taken place in fact, I’ll feature the area in a future walk and try to dispel a few myths about our wonderful region.

There’s a chained gate at the cattle grid. It’s been a bone of contention for several months now since a notice declaring ‘No Public Access’ was erected. We’ve ignored it obviously and in fairness, the gamekeeper that we’ve met on a couple of occasions has been perfectly amicable and generously helpful so we’re not sure of the game being played.

    We’re on what we call Cardiac Hill and walking through the trees as the Vale of Mowbray opens up in front of us as we descend. It’s spring so the rooks and crows are in full voice. The way to tell them apart, I’m told is:

If you see a number of rooks together then they’re crows and if you see a crow alone then it’s a rook (I’m happy to stand corrected).

At the bottom of the hill, we cross the Pennine Way and, looking left, we see the steps that we traversed three hours ago. Through the gate and down through beautiful Swainby to the Rusty Bike to enjoy their pies and salad.

A great loop walk with numerous spring flowers.

  The George Preston for planning it.

Enjoy the snaps…G..x

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