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.

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

Helmsley Bank seemed a good idea because it’s a wooded north-facing escarpment and the weather forecast was for very high winds from the south – shelter from the storm.

But there was no storm, we’d driven up the straight thin road from Helmsley, pulled in at the top to sit there gazing through the windscreen wipers at the grey where there should have been Helmsley Moor. Then lo and behold a whisper of wind pushed the mist away and there was a landscape worth pulling the boots on for.

The road goes on for a third of a mile more and this took us down the bank. Forestry tracks brought the outside edge of the conifers. Heather covered the nearness, Bilsdale filled the mid-distance and the lovely smooth Hawnby Hills rounded off the far.

We circled round Roppa Wood, stepped over becks gushing fresh dark moorland water and hit a patch of pasture, an island of green with stone walls and sheep.

More forest, older ones, looked fine with any harshness of conifers softened by fringes of birch sapling and we walked past these, not into the deep dark depths, the tall bare larch and fuzzy pines a filter with sightlines through to the high escarpment.

I’d often wondered what it would be like to walk just here and it was nice, and then better than that in a charming remnant of old oak woodland. And here there's a detour to a tiny church in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere now, but one read that once in 1891 there was a hamlet of 188 people. Our virtue was rewarded with a woodpecker.

The church has no north windows to ‘avoid trouble and draughts’, but the sun was out, spring bulbs showed optimistically, the oaks threw twisted shadows and the stream had swollen enough to warrant a name – Cowhouse Beck.

Peer into the forest, look for the huge anthills, some the size of a granny–mobile, there was one, an anthill that is, in a recently felled zone, it shouldn’t have survived the harvesting so may have been repaired or made anew out in the open.

Having come down the escarpment there is no escaping the climb back up, 500 feet in total with a steep 150 to finish, though on the diagonal. But it has a good feel despite the mud in places, a sunken route with mossy banks. And to finish a blast along the top track by the forested Helmsley Moor. Yes, less you think I do astral planing, there are two moors so named, one above and one below the escarpment.