480 Ilkley Moor Description and Information | Wharfedale - lower

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480 Ilkley Moor Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Where hast tha bin?

Distance: Five miles.

General Location: West Yorkshire.

Start: Darwin Gardens.

Right of Way: Public, Right to Roam and Common Land. Check for Open Access Restrictions on www.countrysideaccess.gov.uk.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer 297 Lower Wharfedale and Washburn Valley.

Dogs: Legal.

Date walked: Saturday 13 May 2006.

Road Route: From York, via Otley.

Car Parking: Darwin Gardens carpark, free.

Lavatories: Ilkley and White Wells.

Refreshments: White Wells Cafe on hillside. Ilkley - pubs, inns and cafes.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Ilkley TIC 01943 602319.

Terrain: Moor.

Points of interest: Many ‘Cup and Ring-marked’ rocks.

Difficulty: Moderate in nice weather.

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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Ilkley Moor is a place I visit now and then, this time after dropping someone off at Leeds Bradford Airport.

Helpfully there are signs that direct you from the town centre and a pretty car park at the Darwin Gardens, cowslips and horse chestnuts in flower and info on the great man who stayed here in 1859 at the time of the first publication of the Origin of Species.

The walk starts where the land rises straight up to the moor but this wasn’t a route to test your survival skills and anyway halfway up the slope is the White Wells Bath House for your increased fitness. Never mind fitness, here is the ‘elixir of life, the nectar of the gods, the latent heat and natural electricity’, so dip your tired body in the ‘mellifluent, pellucid and diaphanous’ delights’… How? Well, disrobe in a small stone flagged room and step into the stone-lined plunge bath, people have been doing this for 300 years, the temperature is 6 to 8 Celsius and a certificate the reward. And afterwards a cup of tea. All possible at weekends or when the various flags fly there, which is on or near their national days, for us the Israeli and Paraguayan fluttered in the breeze and drizzle.

After tea but not the torture we had a little explore off route on slopes where vivid green bilberry softens the boulders of hard and angular gritstone and rockclimbers’ crags rise fifty feet. Then we took the easy path up to the tops and onto the dark and misty moor.

Visibility dropped to one hundred yards at best, the terrain was fairly flat, the light was uniform luminous grey to all points of the compass, so out came said compass, couldn’t have done the route otherwise.

Oh the joys of modern technology, a click on the satellite navigator, ten seconds later a grid reference on the screen exact to five metres, the OS map pulled out, the line of the route calculated with the compass used as a protractor, the bearing adjusted for magnetic and set, and followed, and checked, again and again as we walked. I like doing this.

A mile on and we reached one corner of our route where there's the certainty of a nineteenth-century stone marker post called Lanshaw Lad. From here we turned to head for the trig point. A half a mile more and it loomed from the gloom at 1400ft. Another quarter mile, after some boggy, peaty land, we could put away the tools and turn off the brain as we joined a drystone wall that guided us off the tops. There were some rocks named the Thimble Stones, one cleft and wedged, plus a couple of communication towers but also a weird and sinister thing that’s perhaps an earlier version of these.

A track next, wide and easy and out of the mist, the clouds actually, the views of Ilkley rooftops, a town not big not small, the green of valley all around it, a pleasant sight. As you come in you’ll pass Wells House, a great cube of a building once a Hydro, a posh version of the plunge pool of earlier. And just before the car park is the Millennium Maze where you can mimic the effect of getting lost on one of my walks.

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.

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