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.

The Hole of Horcum looked magnificent and well attended, its roadside flank lined with those who gazed down in awe, slopes verdant green and lips of purple heather. Travellers, walkers and those just on a whim slurped ice cream and read the National Park’s notices about Open Access territory and a myth about a giant’s wife.

We left such delights for the Old Wife’s Way, a track. But not for long, soon swinging away for a long grassy curve along the airy edge of Saltergate Brow.

Scenery there is, landshapes plastered with colour and the valley where the steam train chugs and hoots. But that’s not what you’ll fix on. Because out there, a short mile away on Lockton High Moor, is the Fylingdales Radar Station.

This used to be famously golf ball shapes, even lauded by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as the ‘geometry of the space age at its most alluring ... on the grandiose undulating silence of the moor’. But the balls came down and now the shape is more an acquired taste. I’ve read it described as a ‘truncated pyramid’ but it has more sides than that, nearly a ‘Toblerone’.

One can't be neutral. Once I spent a day and night up here with a protest group, horrified at the MAD policy, as in Mutually Assured Destruction. One moves on, we moved on, dropping down to a lower place where there's the more beautiful distraction of Malo Cross.

The cross leans at a relaxed angle, it's smoothed and curved and in good nick for its age. One doesn’t see it from any distance, it’s snuck away, but in contemporary days this would be a busy crossroads for panniermen and smugglers.

We pulled out our provisions. In the sunshine but out of sight of the radar station. I once imagined that if one could not see Fylingdales one was invisible from it. But the other week was reminded otherwise when a man fitted me a fancy new TV aerial. After erecting the thing he called me over and showed me a screen that registered the signal strengths, and there they were blocks of the 200 or so I don’t want. But there was a peak he didn’t identify, ‘what's that I asked?’, ‘Fylingdales’. ‘But that’s miles away’ and I live in a valley. The signal ‘drops down’.

I had sunk down by Malo Cross, couldn’t eat my sandwiches, a rare gut ache, should be immune to such trouble after 500 sandwiches inevitably contaminated by bugs all and everything from innumerable Yorkshire nooks and crannies.

The long moorland walk was abandoned. Instead we headed for nearby forest. It was mostly felled, an apocalyptic post world war three landscape, the radiation beat down from the high sun, tracks failed us, we retreated, found the succour of National Trust Land, the comfort of England eternal undamaged.

Here for the able bodied is the symmetry of Blakey Topping, a sweet shape, a nice little climb. But for me just the drag out of the valley from Newgate Foot and leaden steps a mile along the Old Wife’s Way.