The smells around Taddie are enough to make a grown man drool

Distance: Seven and a half miles.

General Location: Near York.

Start: Britannia Bridge Car Park Tadcaster, where A659 crosses River Wharfe.

Right of Way: Public.

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

Dogs: Legal.

Date walked: August 2006.

Road Route: A64 from York.

Car Parking: Britannia Bridge car park, except Market Day Thursday. Free.

Lavatories: Car park.

Refreshments: Pubs, inns and cafes in Tadcaster.

Terrain: Flat farmland.

Points of interest: Samuel Smith’s brewery, the oldest in Yorkshire.

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.

If you can’t immediately see the walk route on the Google Map, please refresh the screen.

Tadcaster has its breweries but we weren’t there for the beer and left the Britannia Bridge on the River Wharfe, declined the rapid succession of the Britannia Inn, the Coach and Horses, the Bay Horse and the Royal Oak and were soon out on the tracks doing a route sent in by Michael Sargood of North Yorkshire County Council, seven miles over the flat farmland of the West Riding as was.

The first couple of miles were notable for a bracing poplar bending blast. The Foss was a mere dampness of a dribble. A swathe of land was fallow. A wood looked healthy, a hedge was cut early. Oblong straw bales were stacked in cubic blocks on stubble that crows gleaned for grain missed by the harvester. There's a tough oak, and this is the stretch for the nice views all around to flatness.

The next mile or so is on Catterton Lane, which is indeed ‘very quiet’ and was fairly ‘pleasant for walking along’, only a few cars. Then the village of Healaugh, which is where the walk gets interesting. The street is lovely, with some unusual windows. Do check out the church. It’s on what makes for a hill around here and has an extravagant Norman arch. Behind the heavy wooden door is an explanation of the arch images including the ‘malevolent beakheads’ and the figures that have been censored by chisel of a couple ‘tangled’ … ‘apparently some emphasis of the dangers of womankind’. The landscape views are good here, to the west. One of the carved males wears a ‘belt of strength’, we strapped on our rucksacks but you don’t need fortitude for this walk, just a liking for hedge, in fact it’s a great bad weather route.

Afternoon rain was on the cards as we took Manor Lane track out of Healaugh but we might not have felt it so high and protective are the hedges for the rest of the walk, though the birds kept their heads down.

So for 2½ miles of track we counted species – hazel, elder, holly, thorn, blackthorn, field maple, lots of that, and also rose, sycamore, bramble, ivy and honeysuckle. All the gaps were plugged with new planting so there were only snapshots of the countryside at gates - variously wheat, barley for the beer, cattle lying down, and smart sheep. Much of the farmland is worked with ‘traditional methods’. The tree of the walk is at Healaugh Manor Farm, it’s a ‘magnificent’ Norway maple with leaves that are the closest to the Canadian Flag.

The westerly wind continued to blast over the hedge tops though it didn’t disturb the thistle seeds in the track verges. A wood one side is called Westmorland Winds, one the other is called Shire Oaks. Oak and ash are the repeated specimens, laden with seeds and nuts, and late on there were the only couple of conifers.

Back into Tadcaster, of which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, perhaps not a Samuel Smith’s fan, wrote has an ‘unmistakable sweet and sickly smell [that] seems to pervade it at all times of the year, day and night’. We didn’t get a whiff and I didn’t get a drop but we got a good walk.

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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