Snow, snow, great joy, snow, more than enough in Ryedale to make it easier to fasten a pair of gaiters to the boots rather than a set of chains to the car wheels, and walk from somewhere easy rather than risk the back roads.

So, for a few minutes Kirkbymoorside was crunched through, to its western edge. For ten minutes the A170 was paralleled east to west on a footpath out of range of salt slush spray. Five minutes on back lanes of tyre polished slipperiness led to the foot of Kirk Dale, a valley that cuts north.

But fifty yards before you reach the valley’s Hodge Beck, stop on the lane and peer right, through a gap in the hedge, to the Kirkdale Caves, a pair of dark eyes into the past set halfway up a cliff and hyena dens of long ago.

Back to the day, the beautiful day. No water flowed over the ford; Hodge Beck was turgid with soft ice. Our path goes upstream through hazel coppice, the pretty little Minster the other side, and then scratches a quite steep and slithery line up the valley side, to drop to the beck again. Here you’ll see the bridges ripped out in the infamous floods of 19 June 2005. And here the beck was dry, but a few hundred yards further on was running merrily, this is limestone country, water vanishes into a changing underground and reappears to alter the surface.

But never mind the water, the day was snow, the trees dressed to the finest twig. The valley was half in blue shadow and happily half in a brilliant blue-sky sunshine that made for a toasted sandwich stop where the views expand. We were joined by a hundred crows and pigeons that came out for a chatty five minutes fly around. Briefly there was the tinkle of snowmelt. From further on a noise of water filtered up through the trees.

This was Hodge Beck crashing over the weir at Hold Cauldron, this old and aptly named mill flooded last summer.

To get out of the valley you’ll take a climb of 150 feet and then flatten out onto fields. The line or condition across the first of these was uncertain so the crop was skirted, yellowhammers flurried along a hedge.

Along the tops there's a quiet connection via Low Hagg Farm, Hagg Road and Hagg Farm to the start of Robin Hood’s Howl which is a mile of descending, narrow valley. In here the sun was sparking and dying through the scrub, the temperature falling for a white freeze night.

A feeling reinforced on exiting the Howl to the big wide Ryedale still shining but for a solid black cloud floor to ceiling over the Howardian Hills. On the tramp back in over the fields the snow dumped down hard again, a perfect day.