465 Hamer Moor Description and Information | Rosedale, North Dale and Hamer Dale

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465 Hamer Moor Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Who put that stone in the way of the view?

Distance: Four miles.

General Location: North York Moors.

Start: Three miles north of Rosedale Abbey.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorers 26 and 27, North York Moors western and eastern areas.

Right of Way: Right to Roam. Check for Open Access Restrictions on www.countrysideaccess.gov.uk.

Dogs: Illegal.

Date walked: Sunday 22 January 2005.

Road Route: From York leave the AI70 at Wrelton. Road signed ‘Egton 9½’ from Rosedale Abbey. Two miles, over Hamer Beck, one mile.

Car Parking: Small grassy, muddy area, with sign. Roadside on first side road north.

Lavatories: Rosedale Abbey.

Refreshments: Inns, pubs and cafés at Rosedale Abbey.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: The Moors Centre Danby 01287 660540.

Terrain: High moor.

Points of interest: By decree of the Council of Elders of the New Lyke Wake Club you can be a Past Master or Past Mistress of the club if you can handle ‘any moor by day or night, whether drunk or sober without map or compass’. At a guess a recipe for black and blue, but in fact the reward is a ‘black and purple boutonnière’.

Difficulty: Moderate in clear and snow free weather.

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

Please click on "Map" to see a cartographic map view of the route and "Hybrid" to see the combined map and Satellite. 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. The two hikers icon shows the start of the route and clicking on it will show the route starting direction.

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‘Welcome to Hamer Moor’ reads the new sign that the North York Moors National Park have put up at a little car park high on the heather east of Rosedale. It was a bleak winter’s day but sometimes it will be buzzing here as a staging point on the Lyke Wake Walk.

Just in case a mist came down we set a compass at 250° but soon found a path near a drystone wall which was easier than roughing it on the invisible bridleway, hereabouts you have the right to roam.

To the south there's sight of the main and pasture patterned part of the valley of Hamer Beck. We crossed this valley in its shallow fade-out top.

The compass bearing set at the start was good enough again, taking us past some beautiful grouse butts like rings of bilberry tossed on the heather. There were white-topped sticks coincident with the route, these are not for walkers but perhaps prevent shooters shooting each other.

That’s the first one and a third miles done, the next had us speeding on good track north, above and parallel to North Dale which you see from its beginning where it forks from Rosedale to its spectacular divide at West Gill and North Gill.

Down below in the deep valley Coal Pit Hill looked like golf greens gone native, up here at a remote 1000 foot a couple pushed a plastic covered bairn in an off-road pram.

There's an interesting stone and then, just before the track ends, what seems just an old stone barn. But on the far side it has crude lancet windows, and twenty yards down the slope there's a mysteriously gurgling spring. This is Job’s Well, obviously holy, and also ‘chalybeate’, that is full of the local iron salts.

Strengthened, as by the job, not pray by Job or dubious liquid, we faced a half-mile that might have been testing, not navigationally, the dark water of North Gill was our guide, but we were unsure if there was a path. There was of sorts, for most of the distance except for the last hundred yards of mature heather but by then we could see three white stones marking the Lyke Wake Walk.

Now came what might have been the fastest one and a third mile leg were it not that here the popular long distance route gashes claggily through naturally boggy ground. So it took an extra five or ten minutes but hardly warranted the chanting of the dismal dirge of the LW walkers of ‘ every night and alle’. The Bronze Age mound of Shunner Howe commands the scene.

Image Gallery

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