Pondlife

Distance: Five miles.

General Location: Scarborough.

Start: Burton Riggs Nature Reserve, Seamer.

Right of Way: Public and permissive.

Date walked: Saturday 22 October 2005.

Road Route: From the main road roundabout near Scarborough Building Society and Morrisons you can see the track with red/white barrier to unsigned car park.

Car Parking: Free car park.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pubs in Seamer - The Copper Horse, The Londesborough Arms.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Scarborough TIC 01723 373333.

Terrain: Flat.

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.

Seamer, why were we here? In the shadow of a Morrisons superstore, one side of the rail tracks, at an unsigned car park reading a vandalised infoboard in the rain, the brightest thing around the graffiti on the A64 underpass.

Because a few day previously we had picked up a leaflet for a route called the Burton Riggs Trail, a new route in a ‘Secrets in the Landscape’ series by the recently formed NE Yorkshire Geology Trust.

The info board was courtesy the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and we left the fringes of urban wildlife and circled off round the lakes that were once gravel pits and where a fisherman dipped his rod illegally. The ducks, geese, seagulls and coots looked hardened to this sort of intrusion, coolest of all was a cormorant that stood one legged on an island and stretched its wings in black immobile pose. You can probably wheelchair this bit on the half mile of hard packed gravel.

Noise from the A64 lingered for a while as we slipped away on a nice green lane, ash leaves turning to yellow depending on the branch, magpies gleaning the stubble fields, deer dancing over the track, clusters of shaggy inkcap fungi dripping black, ditches with rushes and reeds, the Wolds a rise a few miles ahead, berries red and purple in hedges trumpeting white convolvulus, and off to one site in the middle of our route a landfill site.

Yes, a rubbish dump, but not unpleasant at our distance, this has long been an active area.

After a while we crossed New Dike and entered Star Carr, a strange zone, peat soil given over to vegetation gone wild with our route freshly mown. Here was the area of the prehistoric Lake Flixton, site of the well-researched settlement at Star Carr. My navigator played here as a child and has a sharp flint artefact.

A big raptor flew low and light over the scene under the open sky, a hen harrier, a heavy-duty killer.

The River Hertford is the southern boundary of our route, and a curious river it is too, canalised dead straight in a ‘V’ channel and flowing in a counter intuitive direction. We walked it for half a mile, there was a robin at each bridge and a heron lifted. A digger was parked up on the banks, got to keep this channel clear, to speed the water on its way to Malton.

Then we turned north to head back, following the hedgerows and came across a Larsen type bird trap with two live magpies inside, two dead magpies were in the adjacent ditch.

There has been a lot of maize grown hereabouts and quite a few cobs were strewn on the soil and uneaten, perhaps the birds prefer the rubbish from the tip which we had closed in on. Here there was a bit of blown plastic, the only place on the walk.

Rooks and jackdaws hung around, there's a roost in a copse. The horizon turned to shed, a good array of commercial architecture, especially a long low blue construction.

We entered the fray, passed Yorwaste, VW, Polestar, and Boyes-‘for good value’. We avoided Mercedes, skirted the Scarborough Building Society, and took another spin round the Burton Riggs lakes where the birds were evening quiet and had time after our good value walk for some shopping.

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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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.

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