Great Broughton to Kildale (15 km)

Introduction Helmsley Hambleton Inn Rest Day Osmotherley Great Broughton

The Park Nab and Kildale Church

Kildale Saltburn-by-the-sea Port Mulgrave Whitby Ravenscar Scarborough

This day promised (and turned out to be) an easy day with level walking along the top of the moors. It started off well with a lift from the hotel manager up to Clay Bank (most places will offer a lift if you mention that you are doing the Cleveland Way). This left me with only the steepish climb up onto Urra Moor via Carr Ridge.

The Cleveland Way climbs beside a stone wall and through a rocky gully onto the flatter part of Carr Ridge. Keep an eye out for the plaque fixed to the left-hand rocks in the gully in memory of a terrier that stole the show in a television programme about the Lyke Wake Walk. Pause at the top to look back at yesterdays travels. The clear wide track continues past a line of boundary stones to the highest point on the North York Moors (another Round Hill) at 454 metres. It is marked by an OS pillar in the heather, on top of a Bronze Age burial mound.

Across the path from the OS pillar is the Hand Stone, a 1700's guidepost with two roughly carved hands pointing the way to "Stoxla" (Stokesley) and "Kirby" (Kirkbymoorside). A little further on (on the left) is the more ancient Face Stone boundary marker with the carving of a face on its eastern side. This has been around since at least 1642.

Eastwards from Bloworth Crossing

Beyond Round Hill, the track drops to the wet headwaters of High Bloworth Beck and then climbs gently onto the trackbed of the old Rosedale Ironstone Railway. This is followed right to Bloworth Crossing, where there was a level-crossing for the busy pack-horse pannier-way, Westside Road. The peacefulness and serenity of the crossing today makes it hard to envisage the industrial clamour of steam trains and clanging wagons. At the peak of activity (1873) over 1500 tons of ironstone ore were moved each day from the mines in Rosedale to the blast furnaces of Durham and Teesside (a total of 10 million tons over 70 years). The trackbed now provides a splendid level walkway for 6 kilometres along the headwaters of several dales. It ends up at the Lion Inn (good accommodation and food, great beer, camping available, B&B across the road at High Blakey House) - a temptation if you don't mind the detour of 2 or 3 hours.

The Cleveland Way leaves the trackbed at Bloworth Crossing to head north along the moorland road for 4 kilometres passing an ancient waymarker (one of the many moorland crosses with personal names - Jenny Bradley). Abut 200 metres past Jenny Bradley a track heads left to the ruins of the Drum House which was part of a tiny group of railway cottages at Incline Top (called "Siberia" by the railwaymen). The empty ironstone wagons came south from Battersby Junction to the foot of the incline where they were hauled up onto the moor tops by the weight of the full wagons coming down. A kilometre further, there is a viewpoint which allows you to see all the way back to the Clay Bank carpark (only 3 kilometres away as the crow flies but you have walked nearly 9 kilometres) where the rock bluffs on Hasty Bank are prominent.

The moorland road is left when the Cleveland Way takes a right fork skirting around Tidy Brown Hill on a path that falls and then rises onto Battersby Moor. The hill is not tidy or neat - tidy is a corruption of tiddy (local dialect for small) - but it is brown. In a kilometre, a hand gate is reached and a tarmac road joined for the descent around Park Nab and right into Kildale village. There are tearooms on the corner of the road leading to the railway station and church. Kildale village has its own web site: Kildale. The railway provides a link to alternative accommodation either down the dale (e.g. there is plenty of B&B offered in Danby - I recommend the Duke of Wellington pub) or up the dale in Great Ayton or even Middlesborough.

I stayed at Bankside Farm in a caravan.