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Sneaton High Moor is just north of the military exclusion zone around the Fylingdales radar station. The walk starts on the adjacent Goathland Moor at a place where a road dips down to the honeypot villages. Traffic on the A169 blazed light, it was that sort of day. A geologist was packing up his samples and when I said we were walking the Whinstone Ridge he said he was a ‘soft rock man’.

The Whinstone Ridge cuts a straight line through the moors, it was hard volcanic rock used for 19th and 20th century roads, you’ll see a groove of disused quarries right at the start.

If it is a day like ours that’s all you might see. But it’s cool to walk in the gloom, and we speeded up with no views to slow our stride and the track was smooth. A pair of standing stones nestled together, one chiselled with the date 1784 and the word ‘liberty’, fitting this as half the walk is in open access forest. The road noise diminished, the radar station vanished, and its proximity doesn’t affect a GPS, I did wonder.

There is a jagged horizon of conifers to the north and various lumps of landscape that are tumuli. Sheep were the only animals at large.

The track roughened and rose higher into the heather and after a few miles we reached our turnaround point. Here were big bales of cut heather, a standing stone on a tumulus and a trig point, though still no views but mid-distance grey. The rain had thickened, pattering the puddles at the rate of about one sizeable drop per square foot per second, so we didn’t hang around long. A mountain biker freewheeled past on the now smooth forestry track and soon the trees closed in, most holding their darkness for the winter but for the larch needles changing and falling. The best colour was on a pond where the elliptic leaves of the pondweed were half yellow, the rest still green. Another pond held doomed autumn tadpoles, have not seen this before.

Mile after fast mile came the tracks, the scent of cut wood, opportunist ecology, the push of fungi, the occasional dandelion type after a late insect. The rain cut out and a thrush sang, a pigeon flew over and there were flurries of little forest birds.

The forest is mature, is being felled zone by zone, and this brings the temporary opportunity of views obscured for generations and from GR NZ871022 at 20˚ magnetic there was a fresh sight of Whitby Abbey.