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Cold Kirby, in 1941 Arthur Mee wrote that it was ‘as bleak as its name’ but on our mid-winter day a tepid long-legged westerly blew. Mee also called it an ‘out of the way spot’, but these days the National Park Visitor Centre at Sutton Bank is just a couple of miles away. The village can’t have changed in appearance much the last 60 years and is simple not bleak being two parallel rows of each a dozen old stone detached houses and farms. The rows are separated by wide verges and the road stops at the far end at a church.

We walked out onto the back fields, they dip slightly across the fade out top of a valley. Further down we could see people waving flags, it was going to be a sporting day. But for a while we had views to the Hawnby Hills. A ragged ash tree hung on, its dark pointed buds hopefully as hard dormant as nails. Thorn hedging led across the pastures to a little bit of back lane and it to the top of Tanker Dale.

Here were parked a Mule 3010 and a RTV 900, these upsized quad bikes were the main traffic hereabouts. Soon they were in action ferrying beaters up the valley’s steep stone track as we went down it. There are exposed rock layers.

Within a few minutes we joined the bigger valley of Nettle Dale and here were the guns in special tweeds, they had a pile of pheasants. A wounded one, a pheasant, was struggling away up through the trees, it was neatly retrieved by a spaniel and a labrador, a man walked up with fresh French partridges.

The valley is deep, was such a very sheltered mile, there’s a curve called Blind Side and watchtowers fixed to trees. In the lull birds sang, coal tits were low and fearless but six geese kept a tight formation, high enough to be barely audible. Strangely, as if there had been flurries of snow, were incidences of pale feathers snagged in bushes.

The junction of Nettle Dale and Flassen Dale is halfway through the walk. Here is the most water, namely Grass Keld Spring, which is clear and steady and runs into fish ponds downstream and then to Rievaulx Bridge. Otherwise Flassen Dale is like Nettle Dale, mostly dry, occasionally running with a seepage or resurgence. And there is more than something of the Wolds dry valley shape, the bottoms flat and wide, the sides cut at 45 degrees, but here the flanks are forested with conifer or broadleaf.

By the by, for the first quarter mile of Flassen Dale you are the on the Cleveland Way, it, unlike our route, was well signed but this may change.

A nervy thing happened where the conifers hemmed in high each side of the track. For every step we took wood pigeons peeled out with a clatter, we generated a stream of birds, the valley sky held thousands, more feather snow.

For mile after mile along these dales, next to the track, was a metre wide sprinkling of pheasant food, including maize kernels.

Still in the deep we passed a felled area that must have been ablaze last summer with fireweed, then a coppiced length and then a steepish climb to get out to the tops again. Back in Cold Kirby a sheet on a line was horizontal.