477 Gilling East Description and Information | Walks in the Howardian Hills

Wanderlust Home

Walks: Descriptions

477 Gilling East Description and Information

Written by the Wanderlust Team

Friday, 30 November 2007

Wood pigeon?

Distance: Four miles.

General Location: Howardian Hills.

Start: Gilling East.

Right of Way: Public, and Permissive Path that ends 30/09/2011.

Map: Drawn from OS Explorer 300 Howardian Hills and Malton.

Dogs: Legal, but note there were lambing sheep.

Date walked: Friday 21 April 2006.

Road Route: From York via Stillington and Brandsby.

Car Parking: Roadside.

Lavatories: None.

Refreshments: Pub/inn - The Fairfax Arms, Gilling East.

Tourist & Public Transport Information: Helmsley TIC 01439 770173.

Terrain: Valley floor.

Points of interest: Easy for children.

Difficulty: Simple and 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.

Open lightbox

Gilling East is a place I've never started from before, there hadn’t seemed a good circuit from the village, but have just discovered a permissive path that makes for a nice and easy walk.

The first miles are beside Holbeck, a stream that runs along the north edge of a most distinctive valley, a space almost rectangular in shape, about 2 miles in length and half a mile wide, and incredibly flat and open, of stubble and autumn sown crops, there's room here for an airport.

It was quiet, bar the baas of the sheep one of which had just lambed, a messy business. The path was clean, the beck was clear to every pebble, eddying under the roots of alder and willow, willows split, splayed and arched to re-grow one bank to the next, ash turning green from chocolate buds, highland cattle watching, their sharp horns lifted safe the far side of the water. One sign had read ‘Ampleforth 2 miles, Howardian Hills Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ and soon the famous catholic college was visible, a village-sized accumulation of buildings high up on the valley side, sporting a St George’s Flag, which incidentally has, along with the mini skirt, just been listed as one of the ‘21 Icons of Britain’. Another sign read ‘Wildlife Corridor… herons, kingfishers and white clawed crayfish’.

Mid afternoon the sun came out, for shirtsleeves at last this year, mini skirts being rare in this job, and we sashayed round a corner and here, fifty paces off route, three waters meet in a complex of flows and island.

Now facing is the other flank of the valley, at first a rise of conifers, but we continued on the level and soon reached a big old bossy sign that effectively proclaimed ‘wildlife sanctuary but keep out’. But as a sign of the times there’s a new fingerpost fastened to it, and just the other side a lovely lake. In size it’s too big to be a pond, is fringed with bulrush and the surface was arrowed with the swim of waterfowl and the air ricocheted with the rata-tat-tat of a woodpecker, but what caught the fancy was a monster from the deeps that rose and rose with a lazy back breaching and gulps of a huge mouth, no trout this.

Now the route gets lazier still, with dead-end track and Tarmac past bluebell woods. The conifers give way to older trees; horse chestnut leaves broke from sticky buds. The understorey is of garlic, wood anemone and dogs mercury, and that means that these banks have a long wooded history.

Just before we got back into Gilling, below the castle there, we thought to have a look at some ancient fishponds in a wood. They were nigh invisible, but to get there we had to cross three railway lines. They were of gauges, 3 ½, 5 and 7¼ inches, an acreage of work by the Ryedale Society of Model Engineers, the ‘best in the country’. You can ride their steam trains some Sunday afternoons and get a cup of tea, check their website http://www.rsme.org.uk/.

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.

{smoothgallery folder=images/stories/477Gilling}

Comments

Add New

RSS