This year, we said we’d like to explore more of our local walks and historic sites, rather than dashing off on day trips to the Lakes all the time. Mostly we’ve successfully stuck to this, revisiting old favourite like Buckden Pike and Gunnerside Gill, as well as discovering new routes in the North Pennines.
Back at the end of July we drove over to Byland Abbey in the North York Moors: somewhere we’d visited many years ago (pre-Covid) to turn up and find the site closed and covered in scaffolding. What with life, holidays and animals, we just haven’t made it round to getting back, so with a slightly grey Sunday forecast (no good for hills) and a dodgy foot (which I think might have been mild plantar fasciitis), it seemed liked as good a day as any to head back over to Byland.
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Surprisingly, the abbey is free to visit. Surprising because actually the site is much bigger than I expected, rivalling Rievaulx (although not quite as large) with plenty of ruins to explore. There’s a small car park for visitors of the abbey, which was empty when we arrived at 8:45 on a Sunday – it had filled up by lunchtime.
We spent about half an hour wandering around the abbey reading the information boards and admiring the architecture, which even in its ruined state is rather impressive. I especially liked the small tower which remains standing over the entrance – something a bit different from other monasteries we’ve visited before. Byland also has a rather unique collection of medieval tiles, laid in the monastery’s heyday and randomly rearranged in the 1930s.
Dating from the 12th century, the community of monks who founded Byland had been plagued by misfortune in their efforts to establish their own abbey, moving no fewer than six times over a forty year period before finally settling at Byland. While Byland was significant in the region, with its architecture inspiring the rose window at York Minster, it wasn’t all rosy: the monastery was sacked by the Scots in 1322 after the battle of Old Byland. Funnily enough, the Scottish force was led by none other than Robert the Bruce, who seems to be cropping up all over the shop after our trip to Galloway.
Byland Abbey is also home to a volunteer run second hand bookshop, although we were a bit too early for it to be open. Instead, we went for a wander around Byland Woods to give the dogs a bit more of a leg stretch. We followed a 3.5 mile route from the OS maps app – something I’m always slightly wary of as literally anyone can make and publish a route (and some people have a much higher tolerance for wet/boggy/overgrown paths than others).
Byland Wood appears to be managed by Forestry England, although it doesn’t have any way marked trails like their bigger sites such as Hamsterley Forest. Instead, it’s a network of forest trails which you can tie together in any manner you choose: although be aware some of the paths are better maintained than others.
We ended up following the OS route backwards, and the first track we branched off on definitely fell into the ‘overgrown’ category. At the start of the track we’d debated staying on the nice, clear, well surfaced forest road, which we could see continued on to join up with our route later on. However, we unfortunately decided to take the narrower trail to ‘see how we got on’, almost immediately having to fight our way through brambles which just weren’t quite bad enough to make us turn around. If you do this walk I’d definitely recommend sticking to the better path!
The brambles did eventually calm down, only to be replaced by a series of fallen trees: soon to be joined by another tree by the sounds of the rather ominous groaning coming from one of the trees near the track. We managed to step over most of them, with just one short climb up and around another tree – which led us to a higher, clearer (although still grassy) path (which I think we were meant to be on the whole time, ahem).
I must admit to being in a rather bad mood by the time we’d beaten our way back to the main track, and was all for cutting the walk short here where we could know with certainty we wouldn’t face anymore thickets of brambles. Sam managed to convince me to keep going though, so we continued onward down the forest road. We then got a nice view of the surrounding countryside which cheered me up enough to be cajoled into climbing up a small hill to visit the Mount Snever Observatory.
Now disused, the Mount Snever Observatory was built during the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign. The small tower has an inscription, with a short poem adapted from ‘Windsor Forest’ by Alexander Pope:
Here hills and waving groves a scene display
And part admit and part exclude the day
See rich industry smiling on the plains
And peace and plenty tell VICTORIA reigns!
Happy the MAN who to these shades retires
Whom NATURE charms and whom the muse inspires
Who wandering thoughtful in this silent wood
Attends the duties of the wise and good
To observe a mean, be to himself a friend
To follow NATURE and regard his end.
After a quick stop at the tower I was a little worried that the path was going to head down hill both literally and metaphorically, but my worries were unfounded, with nothing worse than you’d expect on a normal woodland walk. The route swings towards the edge of the woods to then head back down hill into the heart of the trees, picking up good tracks to eventually return to the outward trail.
Dog friendly rating: 5/5. Byland Abbey welcomes dogs on short leads, and I don’t think it’s a place that’s ever truly busy. The walk, while overgrown, is great for dogs, being mostly livestock free (you cross through a sheep field to get to the woods, and then return through a field which is sometimes grazed by semi-wild Exmoor ponies). There’s one stile along the way, which has a good sized dog gate (which is actually in better condition than the stile). There’s no water along the way but the route is mostly under the canopy of the trees.
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