496 Moorsholm Description and Information | Walks in Cleveland eastern area

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496 Moorsholm Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Tumultuous tumulus (or is it? George thinks not)

Distance: Seven miles.

General Location: Cleveland.

Start: Moorsholm.

Right of Way: Public and permissive.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer OL27 North York Moors western area.

Date walked: Saturday 16 September 2006.

Road Route: Moorsholm is signed of the A171 Guisborough to Whitby road.

Car Parking: Roadside at Moorsholm.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pub - The Toad Hall Arms at Moorsholm.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Saltburn TIC 01287 622422.

Terrain: Woods, valleys and pasture.

Points of interest: Woodland Trust website www.wt-woods.org.uk.

Difficulty: Moderate.

Please observe the Country Code and park sensibly. While every effort is made to provide accurate information, walkers set out at their own risk.

Please click the image below to go to the walking route sketch map and detailed directions, or scroll down to a Google Map of the route, the route description, and an image gallery. Plus you can bookmark this page on your favourite social bookmarking site, and comment on the walk. We hope you enjoy the walk.

Googlemap

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Moorsholm is a linear village. We started at one end by the Toad Hall Arms. Nearby is a very good series of six connected stone troughs recessed from the pavement into stone wall. Sheep grazed a garden, the church is sombre, there's a history of Cleveland potash mining.

We turned off down a track named Cow Close Lane, a mile of colourful farms, a descent, and rising anticipation. Because – ash, birch, oak, holly, hazel, thorn and beech – here was Cow Close Wood, nature reserve, Semi-Natural Ancient Woodland, a Cleveland treasure tended by the Woodland Trust.

A red sign warned ‘Guisborough Gun Club… danger when red flag flying’. It was muffled quiet in the woods, there was the sound of rain but it was not raining, the mist was condensing on the trees and dripping. Fallen trunks sprouted multicolour fungi, honeysuckle wound thick and everything was draped and strung with spiders’ webs. Male ferns arched bright, a beck tinkled below.

Recently £12,000 of public money has gone into the paths here, miles neatly shored up, made less slippy but still very twisty.

This path, a permissive one, joins a resurfaced bridleway and continues down to the beck. The white gills of fungi warned poisonous. We climbed out to Freeholders’ Close Lane that is half a mile of bridleway, on the Langbaurgh Loop and recently cleared of veg mechanically and with Asulux herbicide.

We passed two farms, couldn’t see for the weather past the next hedge and had a blast of walk-rage at a gate where the fastener was wrapped in rusty barbed wire that you wouldn’t maybe see. We crossed pasture, rough grassland and reached the hamlet of Gerrick that’s in part a ruined farmstead including a superb barn and a house of herringbone dressed sandstone that’s still got its roof, just.

It has a good view too. And we were just getting one, enough for the pudding basin profile of Freebrough Hill, so regular that when a child I assumed it to be manmade. It's bigger than Silbury Hill.

Then we could see Moorsholm a mile or more away and in-between the woods again. This is a figure of eight walk but with two close together waist sections, and the second time we crossed over a large flat area of pasture that is surrounded like an island by the woods. And then down again, fording becks dry on the day, and up steep to a ridge where a strip had been mown through the bracken. Lucky timing, but even so the ‘tracks’ had been less mellow than we imagined. But we’d had the mists/sea fret and witnessed astonishing fruitfulness – sloes, damson, apple, thorn in these lovely, looked after woods. Saw but one deer and one pheasant.

Then we found ourselves, there had been a lot of map, compass and GPS on this walk, on a flatness of pastures looking towards Moorsholm, the pub marking one end of the village, the church the middle. A rabbit with some Dutch genes and Cleveland County Council gates distracted. We couldn’t accelerate to the finish but the cultivated footpath might be reinstated by the time you tread.

Image Gallery

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