Please click on "Map" to see a cartographic map view of the route and "Hybrid" to see the combined map and Satellite. "Terrain" shows the contours of land over and around the route.

Please use the zoom tools or drag the slider to move in close or to zoom out (or use mousewheel zoom). Use the pan tools to move the map vertically and horizontally or place your mouse over the map and it changes to a hand; click your mouse to "grab" the map to manually scroll the map in any direction. Click on "Open Lightbox" to see the Google Map in its own window.

The two hikers icon shows the start of the route. Click on the hikers to get the route direction - clockwise or anticlockwise.

Please note that the outline route is a guide only and on full or near full zoom cannot be guaranteed to follow every twist and turn of the route described.

Glaisdale has three adjacent bridges on the River Esk. We sat in the car under the dripping arches of the Middlesbrough to Whitby railway line, the occasional car went past on the Esk Dale road and a photographer gave the pretty and romantic arched stone of Beggar’s Bridge a ten minutes once over.

Then there was more action, four off road motorcyclists balked at crossing a swollen side stream ford, a dozen tiny long tailed tits fluttered like the last leaves in the bare branches and we set off up a stone track, a green lane running with water.

After a while there's a spot with little old iron pits that are now colonised by oaks, and also a nice green antique caravan. Then the track picked up a bit of metalling, the weather vane on a farmhouse quivered with the southerly and we joined Smith’s Lane, the back road to Rosedale.

A last bit of climbing to 800ft opened out the views, east down Esk Dale to the sea, and at a more southerly angle, across moors to the Fylingdales radar station from where sun came also, rays low and intense.

An info board read ‘Welcome to the Egton Estate’ and here we turned down into the valley of Glaisdale, on tracks part sunken and with flooding springs.

After a thin conifer belt we paused at the walling of a sheepfold. Here I felt, optics aside, that I should with the sun to my back cast a giant shadow on the far side of the valley. Admire the classic shape, the pattern of farms up to the head, the village of Glaisdale running down the far flank at the mouth. A cloud of a thousand seagulls rose and settled on a pasture, like in one of those shake-the-snow domes.

A track contours back above the valley floor though West Arncliff Wood, these are SSSI and ‘ancient semi-natural’ and ‘ancient replanted’. The route has old cut stone reinforcement at a stream. Nine years ago I saw large black pigs ranging here, recently hazel have been coppiced. In the wood, on the right, very near the track, there is for some purpose a closet-sized post and rail fenced enclosure with inside a particular and regular stacking of a dozen metre-length logs that are brambling over.