Gisborough Moor in the mist

[nigheandonn]

There are three Marilyn summits on the North Yorkshire Moors, two of them within yards of the Cleveland Way - but the third is a good mile off the path, and I just hadn't had time for it as I passed. I wasn't too sorry even at the time, though, as it gave me a a good excuse for coming back to the moors I'd fallen in love with, and crossing them instead of just skirting the edge - as well as the chance to climb Roseberry Topping from the front rather than the back, and visit the various Captain Cook things in Great Ayton.

I had my traditional day off planned after a Thursday night festival practice in Newcastle, so the plot was laid - although train times and opening hours meant that I ended up doing it back to front, down to Commondale first and back over to come down Roseberry Topping rather than up.

A slightly eventful journey saw me missing the Hartlepool train, and then doing a mad dash across Darlington to buy some new trousers, having come away without any - but I got there in the end.

Commondale station had a lovely mural of the moors, but sadly the real thing didn't look quite like that - a bit more grey and damp!

Station mural

Misty moors

Still, neither the forecast nor the sky were hopeless, and I set off up to the village. It didn't look much like summer in one way, but in another it was - I'm used to foxgloves everywhere, and to plants growing in all the walls, but not to the two combined!

Foxgloves in the wall

Through the village I turned onto the track towards North Ings farm. The visibility wasn't great, but it wasn't impossible either, and my main concern at first was with keeping my feet dry, so I was glad to see it was a good track at first. By the farm, though, it took a detour into a little wet path, down through some new trees to cross a burn and skirt a field before joining the main track again.

Onto the moor

A tiny path led from the main track to where a monument was marked on the map - I was expecting a death on the moors, or maybe an old battle, but it turned out to be a proper WW1 war memorial.

War memorial

I'd read that the moors would be glorious in August, and it must be true, but even in late June they weren't doing too badly.

Heather

There wasn't an awful lot to see, though, so it was just a case of keeping on - a good track and a nice empty space for walking, even if the views were missing.

With the cloud so far down I didn't feel like taking any detours, so my route was just following the track, along to where a sharp bend is shown on the map - really a junction, but the straight on is marked with a discouraging sign - and on again with a not quite so good track and a bit more rain, but more of an empty moorland feel.

The next track junction almost marks the high point of the moors, but I knew that the real high point must be just out of sight somewhere behind.

The track junction

There was no very definite path, but tentative exploration brought me to a mound marked with a rough old cairn.

The high point - probably

Gisborough Moor summit

I had headed straight over from the junction, but going back I decided to head a bit further north, so that there could be no doubt about which side of the junction I was on when I hit the track - one of my few useful bits of navigational knowledge. Only somehow it didn't quite work, because I didn't meet any track anywhere, only an odd dip like a dry burn. By the time I'd gone searching about a bit I knew I couldn't go back, so on was the only way.

I wasn't really scared, or even particularly worried, because I had a lot of light and although the moor was flat around me it wasn't so wide that I could avoid descending somewhere fairly soon, but I got pretty fed up as the rain got worse and I cared less about what I was walking through as long as I was going somewhere! The main danger as I understood it was that I would walk in curves rather than in a straight line, so when I met a grouse butt I decided to follow the line it was pointing in, although it wasn't the way I'd intended to go - at least it was a straight line, and where there were butts there must be access for shooters. And that one led me to another and then more, although they didn't seem to be any of the lines of butts that were marked on the map.

After a while I did seem to be dropping into the start of a narrow valley, although again it didn't seem to be anywhere which was obvious on the map - and eventually I was rewarded by coming to a tiny path, which became a bigger path, which led to a track, and a track had to be going somewhere, even if I didn't know where. After a while, though, it started to look awfully like a track I already knew, although I couldn't be quite sure what was familiar about it. The real test would be if I came back to the war memorial - and before very long I did.

Going back to Commondale was the easiest option in a way, and if there had been a train due heading for Great Ayton I probably would have done, but the next one I could make was the late afternoon train I was intending to catch at the other end. So the easiest solution seemed to be to head back, over the same ground back to the first junction and on to the second, this time refusing to be led astray and turning right to head for the northern edge of the moor.

The one good thing about this journey was that the rain more or less stopped - otherwise it was just a long plod through nothingness, with a confusing feeling that I was going uphill, although I knew I was heading very slowly down. I ignored the turning for Sleddale, although I was glad to meet it more or less where I expected, and eventually came to the trig point just before the edge of the moor.

Trig point

From here the world began to contain a bit more than just grass and heather and track and blank emptiness, which made a nice change, although trees do make very strange ghostly shapes when they first start to appear.

Ghostly trees

I kept to the wall along the edge of the moor - it was nice to have some trees and walls and fences to look at but long wet grass overhanging the edge of the path meant that I was soon nearly as wet as I had been in the rain, at least on my bottom half.

After a while the Cleveland Way came out of the woods to join me, giving me some more shapes to look at, and a surprisingly bright flash of colour on its sign.

Meeting the Cleveland Way

The next part of the path I remembered for its paving slabs, including two halves of a dedication plaque from somewhere or other. Despite the plants growing high on either side of the track it didn't feel much like summer, and I caught myself thinking something about the moors 'at this time of year' as if it was October or November.

After a while I came back to fences - I kept hoping that every junction would be the Roseberry Topping one, but it took a while until it was. Things had been clearing up a bit, but the hill might as well not have been there, and I decided that there was no point in climbing a hill I couldn't see and set out to skirt it, with a bit of retracing my steps when the obvious path turned out to be the wrong one. At least I got a view to the other side of a valley for the first time since the beginning of the day.

First view of the day

At this point, though, the mist came back as bad as ever, as I came down to the tiny temple place.

Small temple

Still, I was almost in civilisation, with nothing left to do except cross a field I couldn't see the other side of and drop down through the woods - only to find out that I had gone wrong one last time when the map ran out and was now in Newton under Roseberry rather than somethere near Great Ayton. But it had a pub which fed me a very belated lunch, and a bus, and I got on my way home. And I'll go back to visit Captain Cook some other time...

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