With Martin, Tommy and Joe. Walk 31 of Paddy Dillon’s nice Cicerone guide to the North York Moors is a ribbon walk from Blakey Ridge to Battersby Junction. As we had two cars, it seemed we might as well take advantage and do a ribbon. We met up at Battersby Junction. The empty station carpark had a sign saying only for passengers so we parked my car in the main – OK the only - street outside a house with a dog in it who got very agitated by my presence outside his window while I transferred self and key belongings to Martin’s car which he drove over Westerdale to the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge. It had been dry a long time and the fords which can make this road exciting in certain conditions were all bone dry. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and the Inn was busy with early lunch customers. We couldn’t resist joining them ordering some light and rather tasty things to eat. We then moved the car to the car park a little to the south where a road branches off down toward Farndale. Just here at the junction a track goes off northwest through a gate. This walk is fabulously simple to describe. You follow this track, an old railway line, all the way to Battersby. So we did. It is a great walk. First it winds over the moors for a few miles. Over Dale Head and Milled Head to Bloworth Crossing. It was a beautiful day and there were wonderful views down into and over Farndale.
Eventually we reached the incline down Greenhow Bank. Just before we got to this we met someone coming the other way by bike. We were quite impressed when we saw what he had just climbed. It is a fierce, unrelentingly steep – about 1:5 according to Dillon – climb of around 800 ft down (for us, up for him) a long gravelly track. The view changes here and is dominated by Urra Moor, Hasty Bank and the great flat plain that stretches away north of here towards Teesside. At the bottom of the incline the path flattens out again and easily follows the edge of the woods as far as Bank Foot from where a very short road walk returned us all to where we had left my car which I now made use of to return Martin and the boys to theirs and so home.
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