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Danby’s North York Moors National Park Moors Centre has recently been refurbished so it was time to take a look. First though, with the weather forecast finishing with the words ‘you have been warned’, we walked.

The opening quarter hour is on the road, avoidable if you’re using the Moorsbus, but was OK, the fastest traffic the zip of primary colour cyclists. And the landscape was picturesque - witness a half dozen roadside watercolorists.

At Danby there's the Stonehouse Bakery and Tea Shop and the Duke of Wellington and in the village hall was an Esk Valley Enterprise Market.

This walk was quite enterprising, the cows at Hollin Top Farm hunkered down in sympathy with the weather forecast, and also for us it was an exploration of new territory, we were going to have to find a path or fail.

A pleasant track took us up, the hot silence broken by the hum of a hive of bees holed up in a sycamore tree. The landscape stretched, open access land was reached and on a high horizon we could make out through binoculars the grouse butts we had to reach to make a circuit.

However there seemed no direct serviceable path to them so we retreated and slipped into a parallel side valley and found a good narrow path along Ewe Crag Beck. An interesting valley this, a snaky shape.

There had to be a way out to make the tops and a route, our path continued for half a mile of the valley then to our relief crossed the beck, climbed to the moor, hit the heather and connected with the track servicing the half mile of grouse butts along Haw Rigg. A made day, and to celebrate sandwiches near the ambience of grouse butt number 8, drystone constructed and all.

The weather was still fine though the sky was bruising, the only flashes the cotton grass on the heather.

One good track led to another and to sea views, no blue mind, but the pencil shape of a ship on the grey on grey. There's a trig point nearby at 879ft.

We turned south and headed back on a thin but smooth path/track across the heather flats, a mile or more that brings up sight of Esk Dale again and the valleys of Danby Dale and Little Fryup Dale that run off from it.

The descent brings you back to the Moors Centre but the place might not elevate a walker’s spirits. The tea and lemon drizzle cake were a tasty refuge from the rain but the information though colourful and child friendly is a refuge from a rambler’s reality, like living in the past. You could walk round the building, through the new spaces, mutter to the fibreglass farmer and leave without knowing that the Countryside and Rights of Way Act exists. And this, the Right to Roam, is the best legislation for walkers since the banning of mantraps. Not a single map is displayed of the Open Access Land, one had to search for bits and pieces, and ask for information.