frank'sYORKSHIRE WALKS
My Walking Diary
These Diary pages are just a few notes and pictures of the routes I walk. I hope that they give you some ideas for walks of your own and if you need more details of a particular route you can use the route request form to contact me
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1
January 2002
Bridestones, Lockton & Hole of Horcum North York Moors Map: OS Outdoor Leisure 27 North York Moors Eastern area. 1:25000 View 1:50,000 map from Multi-map See also Walk 4 to print out
This
morning I met my sister and brother-in-law at the Hole-of-Horcum
car park at 11.00am (to allow for the effects of last night's
celebrations). It was another good day for a walk with bright
winter sunshine and clear skies on the moor tops, whilst the valleys
were filled with freezing fog. We started out along the Old Wives
Way towards the Bridestones. Once we were clear of the car park
area and established on our route there was the dome of Blakey
topping over to our left.
The whole moor top had about 3 inches of snow glinting in the
sunshine, the whole scene was magical with every twig on the trees
coated with frost. After about 3 miles we approached the Bridestones.
These are large blocks of soft sandstone that have been worn into
weird shapes by the gritty wind on this exposed part of the moor.
They are accessible from the Dalby forest drive and are well worth
a visit. We sat on a rock shelf on one of the stones for our lunch.
My sister had brought her 'Walkman' to listen to a program about
the life of Humphry Littleton and as we walked our progress was
punctuated by her laughter at the gems arriving via her headphones.
We followed the path down from the Bridestones ridge to the edge
of a car park on the Dalby forest drive and turned along the path
passing a former youth hostel to follow the track up hill and
across the fields until we reached the main Whitby to Pickering
road at Lockton.
We crossed the main road heading for the village and as soon as
we reached the edge of the village we turned right onto a path
across a field and down through the woods to the valley bottom.
Here we crossed the footbridge and climbed the other side to the
road as it enters Levisham village. There is a seat beside the
road there and we stopped for a drink before continuing up through
the village to join the track to Dundale Pond. From here we kept
to the track around the rim of the Hole-of-Horcum back to the
car park. The whole route is around 9 miles and took us four and
a half hours including our stops. We drove back to York to my
sister's house for a meal and spent a frustrating hour from 4.00
to 5.00pm (I heard both news bulletins on the radio) covering
just 2 miles along the Malton by-pass. It turned out to be nothing
more than the sheer volume of traffic trying to leave the by-pass
to continue along the single carriageway part of the road to York.
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