478 Ingleby Greenhow Description and Information | Cleveland Hills

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478 Ingleby Greenhow Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

You'll blossom on a Wanderlust walk (shameless commercial)

Distance: Four and a half miles.

General Location: Cleveland Hills.

Start: Bank Foot, nr Ingleby Greenhow.

Right of Way: Public.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer OL26 North York Moors western area.

Dogs: Legal.

Date walked: Saturday 29 April 2006.

Road Route: Take road junction signed ‘Bank Foot’ on the northeast outskirts of Ingleby Greenhow, then ½ mile.

Car Parking: Bank Foot, by track.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pub/Inn - The Dudley Arms at Ingleby Greenhow.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Great Ayton TIC 01642 722835.

Terrain: Below, on and above escarpment.

Points of interest: Views.

Difficulty: Comfortable 600 foot climb.

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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Bank Foot is one of those straightforward names, go east from the farm there and you go straight up, up an escarpment of the Cleveland Hills and onto the moors, an up of 500 feet. On this walk that effort comes later because first there's a nice mile across the fields to the hamlet of Battersby, a stroll memorable for the views to Captain Cook’s Monument two miles away and for the shock of white in the hedges with the flowering of the blackthorn.

Battersby is a pleasant hamlet that sits on a quiet loop road, its houses are of dressed sandstone and a stream runs through beds of wild garlic.

At the last house a sunken green lane takes off for the escarpment and makes for a super climb, one of the best ways up around here. For the first length the gradient is gentle and the views to the mouth of Kildale are lovely. Along the route are grown out hawthorn, some big ash trees and for colour a blaze of gorse. The track steepens when it enters a narrow conifer belt; a twist and a turn makes the altitude. The trees, mainly larch and pine, let in enough light for the flowers, the white petals of the wood sorrel against their fresh green leaves. A small cut is of flaky shale, another a wet face of fern and moss.

At the top are the moors of heather and bilberry and as the latter makes a comfortable cushion we took a sandwich stop that stretched in the sunshine to a doze. An old and spooky barbed wire wound pole was topped with the words ‘Please Keep to Footpath’ but this is Open Access land and, lest one should forget, soon a National Park notice reminds and welcomes the walker or cyclist.

A wheeled one spun past us on the track over Battersby Moor, visible through the heather for a fair distance. But time up here was too short, the views are tremendous, of the green fields we had crossed held in the arms of the hills and beyond the vastness of the plains to the sea. Actually we dawdled along the top, spent a while watching the spinning and flipping aerobatics of the lapwings.

There's a short terrace of houses on the plains, earlier on we’d walk quite close to them but now they were visible, it’s called Battersby Junction and reminds that once this was an area important for its railway that collected ironstone from the Rosedale mines deep in the moors and fed the blast furnaces of the burgeoning Middlesbrough.

The way off the moor starts as a path in the heather and then connects with a track, passes Battersby Crags and then for the last bit there's an option through some woods. We thought this one of the best of the many routes we have taken hereabouts.

Image Gallery

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