475 Goathland Description and Information | Walks in Goathland

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475 Goathland Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Still never seen a Goath around these lands, have you?

Distance: Five miles.

General Location: North York Moors.

Start: Goathland.

Right of Way: Public, and Open Access, remember to check for Open Access Restrictions on redesigned website www.countrysideaccess.gov.uk.

Dogs: Not legal.

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

Date walked: Saturday 8 April 2006.

Road Route: From A169 signed and a few miles.

Car Parking: Carpark was £1.50, little roadside.

Lavatories: Goathland car park.

Refreshments: Inns, pubs and cafes in Goathland. Pub at Beck Hole - the Birch Hall Inn.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Goathland info centre. Whitby TIC 01723 383636.

Terrain: Mostly moor.

Points of interest: Nearby waterfalls of note. Goathland on Malton to Whitby Coastliner Bus Service

Difficulty: Quite 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.

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Goathland is of course the heart of Heartbeat Country. Amongst its many attractions it has a station on the North York Moors Steam Railway. Here a photographer had his tripod set but it was too cold to wait with him for the train, so we crossed the tracks from 1960s nostalgia to twenty-first century open access moorland and headed north.

It soon dawned that we were not tramping just any normal Landrover route, there being a precision of gradient, a couple of metal spikes, a rotting sleeper. The easy walking made for rapid progress but not to any great altitude, Goathland Moor is not one of the highest, but up enough to see plenty of the moors - the heather, the grasses, withered bracken and the curlews and lapwings.

Two miles took no time, and with the track we reached Whinstone Ridge. This ridge shows on geological maps as a ruler straight line angling across the North York Moors. But a ridge reduced, because it was quarried out for the Whinstone, the only rock hereabouts hard enough for early road surfacing, one of its last uses was for World War II aerodromes. The ridge is a deep V shaped quarry, really quite dramatic.

We walked along its length a while, taking in the views that to the west hold a handful of Esk Dale villages.

This spring has been awful so far, we’ve often worn more clothing than on midwinter walks and this day was no exception, soon there was hail turned to rain to diminish the pleasure. We sped through ancient field systems of fallen down walls, barely glanced at an old cottage neatly fixed up, averted gaze from one that’s a muddle of shapes, took whichever path led downhill, heard the urgent chuffing of a steam train, saw only its white puffs and found ourselves cowering on a bench under a holly tree right at the edge of Newton Dale

Below the bench the rail line runs alongside the waters of Eller Beck and normally here would be a very good place to sit and wait for sight of the train, but the shelter of Beck Hole seemed a much better bet. A quarter of a mile and we were there. Arthur Mee described it in 1941 as ‘a tiny hamlet as lovely as its situation’ and with ‘rare flowers’. Nowadays it’s better known for its tiny pub. The two bars were packed, the dozen or so walkers faced with drinking in the rain or steaming together tight as penguins. They seemed a little disconcerted that, having set out for open spaces, they were then to be denied any modicum of personal space, but at least were well armoured by their layers of clothing.

All that was left was the pleasant incline, once a horse drawn railway, back up to Goathland through woods about to burst with the delayed delights of spring.

Image Gallery

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