470 Wykeham Description and Information | Walks around southern areas of Moors

Wanderlust Home

Walks: Descriptions

470 Wykeham Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Misty in Monochrome (George has forgotten to press his colour button)

Distance: Three and a half miles.

General Location: Near Scarborough.

Start: Wykeham.

Right of Way: Part public. Part permissive paths that is due to end in September 2010. May be renewed.

Dogs: Legal.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer OL27 North York Moors eastern area.

Date walked: Friday 17 February 2006.

Road Route: From York via the A64. Wykeham is on A170.

Car Parking: Roadside in village or, for patrons only, the Downe Arms.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pub/hotel - The Downe Arms and the Wykeham Tea Room.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Scarborough TIC 01723 373333.

Terrain: Glaciated.

Points of interest: The Revenge was a battleship at Trafalgar captained by Robert Moorsom from Whitby, it had some Scarborough crew. And www.neyorksgeologytrust.com.

Difficulty: Easy.

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.

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.

If you can’t see the walk on the Google Map, please refresh.

Open lightbox

Wykeham, one of a string of villages on the A170 near Scarborough, is the hub of Trail 7 in the Secrets in the Landscape series produced by North East Yorkshire Geology Trust.

As their walk looked more mentally than physically demanding we had a mid-morning cup of coffee at the Downe Arms where the landlord Neil Sands said we could leave our car in the hotel car park, he kindly extends this offer to you, if patrons. We pulled on our boots to the bustle of the Friday farmers’ market - Greek Olives, Dales cheese, flesh and Whitby fish.

Five minutes into the trail we stopped where the glacier once stopped, on a mound of moraine, a pile with ‘exotic pebbles’. The viewbench angles towards the Wolds, over the Vale of Pickering where stone-aged man had to cross ‘small lakes, bogs and dense woods’.

We wandered down and through parkland with specimen conifers, beech, willow, and snowdrops, heard a song thrush and saw a running hare. You get another nice viewpoint back towards Wykeham instructive on the glacier and meltwater and then go back into the village. A sparrow was attending to a crevice next to the sundial on a nineteenth century house.

Now the trail takes in the Downe Arms again and the leaflet points out its limestone was formed in a ‘shallow tropical sea’. In the time it takes to say ‘a Gin and Tonic’ there's an 18^th century icehouse. This has been recently restored and is ace, a brick arch/dome the size of a double-decker bus half buried into an earth bank and underneath, continuing the brick, a deep ‘egg shaped chamber’. The ice would have been collected from the pond or brought in by train after a mild winter, and then covered with straw.

The route crosses the old rail line on, in geology-speak, a Kame Terrace and passed a caravan site, a terminal moraine.

There were eight donkeys, large horse and lovely long necked llamas, the latter apparently ‘gentle intelligent creatures, the ideal walking companions’.

Next, and still on the up, there's Revenge Wood, saplings to commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar 1805 and, according to Lord Downe on the Dawnay Estates website, ‘the first wood planted at Wykeham in many years, which is not for the moral and physical well-being of pheasants!’

The estate feel continued across a parkland pasture favoured by a hundred fieldfares. Our boots got muddy by a pond with willows, I had missed the ‘shrimp burrows’ but noted the Bahamas connection with the field rocks.

Then a bit of back road brought us round, a skylark sang and a sparrowhawk beat us into the village of Ruston.

Here it’s nice and only ten minutes back to Wykeham via a cutting of the disused railway or past hints of medieval fishponds. The farmers’ market was packing up, we had a hearty lunch at the Downe Arms, and I'll close with thanks to Lord Downe and Defra for the permissive paths and to the North East Yorkshire Geology Trust for the leaflet.

Image Gallery

Please click on the word "Pictures" to toggle the thumbnails on and off. Hover your mouse over the image to see the forward and back arrows to view the gallery.

{smoothgallery folder=images/stories/470Wykeham}

Comments

Add New

RSS