Crikey, hasn’t it been a wet and soggy start to 2026. Here’s hoping that the weather is just getting all of the rain out of its system early and we get another beautiful summer like last year…
Towards the end of February we were finally forecast a break in the one thousand days of rain. With sunny spells on the horizon, we dusted off our Cicerone guide to the North York Moors and headed east for a 6 mile walk.
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I’d wanted to explore the route we’d chosen for quite a while: we just never got round to it last summer (so many places, so little time). The walk was a moderately strenuous six mile loop taking in Battersby Moor and Ingleby Moor, including a short section on the Cleveland Way. The weather didn’t quite live up to expectations but we still had a nice enough time – but I think if we’d waited until August it would have been fabulous with the heather out.
The Cicerone guide has two options for this walk, one where you park at the bottom of the hill and walk up the road to the moor (and back down at the end), and another shorter route where you start at the top of the first hill. I don’t think it’s being lazy to pick the shorter option when it’s February and the sky is looking a little bit more menacing than you expected…
There’s limited parking at the top, with one space shortly after the second cattle grid, and a few more spaces at the end of the road. The route heads downhill almost immediately on the roughest track of the walk – thankfully, it’s not particularly steep. Despite the weather there were nice views down into the dale below, which we reached in no time, to then climb back up the hill into a small forestry plantation.
The climb back up was mercifully short (I’m feeling rather unfit after a somewhat sedentary winter avoiding the rain), and Coal enjoyed having a run off the lead in the woods. Once you emerge from the woods back onto the moor it’s plain sailing and gentle inclines from here – my favourite! Although it did start to feel a little unchanging by the time we’d walked down the moor, looped around the end of the valley and walked back down to the car. There are periodic glimpses of Roseberry Topping and Captain Cook’s monument, but these are fairly distant and probably not as good as the view from Lordstones.
Having seen a grand total of zero people over the first four miles of the walk, we joined the Cleveland Way expecting to see a few more walkers knocking about. It is, after all, our local national trail. What rather took us aback was the veritable convoy of dirt bikers out zooming down the lane – as one of them said to us (having kindly stopped to let us pass, so as not to splash us with a puddle) ‘it’s like the M62 up here today!’. We even saw a few land rovers off roading (happily none of them broke down).
Once we left the Cleveland Way motor traffic died down, although we did continue to see a few more walkers (who’d possibly linked up our trail with the track coming off Ingleby Incline – another route on my list). All in all not a bad route and probably one we haven’t seen at its best given that it was in its winter clothes. If you want to try this route I can’t find a description online, although there is a GPX file (going in the opposite direction) on the OS maps app.
Dog friendly rating: 3.5/5. Much of this walk’s dog friendly rating comes from the fact that it’s stile free, and that there’s an opportunity for a bit of off-lead time in the woods. The rest of the time, dogs need to be strictly on lead: there are sheep and ground nesting birds throughout. The route sticks to public rights of way, so you can take your dog with you under close control, but be aware that some of the walk crosses access land with a dog ban: so you really do need to stick to the right of way to avoid being told off by a land owner!
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