460 Nether Poppleton Description and Information | Walks in Harrogate and York areas

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460 Nether Poppleton Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Mighty fallen

Distance: Seven miles.

General Location: York.

Start: Nether Poppleton.

Right of Way: Public and permissive.

Dogs: Legal.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer 290 York, Selby & Tadcaster.

Date walked: Friday 2nd December 2005.

Road Route: Off the York outer ring road.

Car Parking: Roadside and area near church.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pubs - The Lord Collingwood Inn, Lord Nelson Inn, White Horse Inn.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: York TIC 01904 621756 and village website - http://www.poppleton.net. Red House Chapel website - http://redhouse.orpheusweb.co.uk/caravanpages/chapel.htm.

Terrain: Flat farmland.

Points of interest: Republicans best avoid the barn mentioned in text, for here in 1660 Lord Fairfax and 200 others gathered and marched to York to announce the restoration of Charles II.

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.

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Route Description

A mile from the razzmatazz of Clifton Moor, along a road of newish brick, there is clustered the old brick of Nether Poppleton, and if you’ve had enough, enough of the flash and fancy that is, there is the River Ouse. We parked on a street and wandered past the Lord Nelson and down to the water and the path that follows it tight the next two miles. First thing I noticed, unexpected, was the quiet and the immediate distance from the city, no hint beyond the occasional rattle of a train and the spike of pylons, past these it’s country.

Not much happened, small things, the crunch of sycamore leaves, the cold breeze ripple of the flow, blackbirds bundling in the willows. Ducks splash landed and ducks took off, and a foolish frantic pheasant made a drama of crossing the Ouse from west to east.

The lack of buildings and of activity, the sameness mile by mile, all makes for thought, or if not that then chat and such, that might just suit the season one way or another, the day cold, pale sun, quarter moon hung.

Until Red House where there are old buildings and waterworks. Barges were moored up and on the curve of reservoir concrete a dozen cormorants lined up in typical black and sinister priest-like pose. Thanks here to Yorkshire Water for the short permissive path that makes the route and lets us leave the river through some scrub for a return.

But before you head off back do visit the seventeenth-century chapel at Red House, and yes, again make that offering to the snow goddess, for a winter hard and short and real.

The dead-end road took us some distance, hedges either side and then pastures of ridge and furrow. Here there were white geese, soon to be digested. What else? A rat, Thick Penny Farm, oaks persistent green and a reward poster for Molly a Border terrier. The next farms were not, each one and every, the most lovely, old cars and some claggy track, but there were some glimpses of the moors from what hereabouts passes for a hill, a half minute climb from thirty to all of fifty feet.

We were closing back on the city, a single chimney reminded, a last half mile with fields of fine sand/silt/clay soil, and back to find on the car windscreen a computer generated note that read in bold ‘There is a car park at the bottom of the village. Thank you’. This we located, and there a church, millennium green, an historic barn and a metal sculpture of an owl. And on the drive back a cormorant tore at road-kill pheasant.

Image Gallery

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