North York Moors

Seen from the Vale of York the North York Moors are a single dark wall, and that is roughly what they are: a tilted tableland of Jurassic sandstones and shales carrying the largest continuous expanse of heather moorland in England, designated a national park in 1952. For two weeks either side of late August the whole upland turns purple — a managed landscape, burned and gritted for red grouse, walled off below into the green corridors of Eskdale, Rosedale, Farndale (whose wild daffodils are a spring pilgrimage) and Bilsdale. The western scarp breaks along the Cleveland Hills at Sutton Bank — "the finest view in England", in the vet-author James Herriot's much-quoted verdict — and at the freestanding half-cone of Roseberry Topping, whose profile collapsed in 1912 when the ironstone mining beneath it gave way.

The moors' edges are their history. The coast between Staithes and Robin Hood's Bay is the tallest on England's eastern seaboard — Boulby's shale cliffs push past 200 metres — and its rock built industries: alum quarried and boiled here for three centuries (a chemistry that consumed shiploads of urine), jet — fossil monkey-puzzle wood — cut and polished in Whitby into Victorian mourning jewellery, and the ironstone of Rosedale, whose calcining kilns and abandoned high-level railway now make the moor's best industrial-archaeology walk. Whitby itself compresses the story: the abbey on the headland hosted the Synod of 664 that fixed the date of English Easter and housed Cædmon, the first named English poet; the harbour below trained James Cook and all four of his exploration ships; and Bram Stoker landed Dracula on the beach in 1897, a debt the town has never stopped collecting.

Monks and steam fill the valleys. Rievaulx, the first great Cistercian house in the north, stands roofless and complete in the Rye valley near Byland and the Carthusian cells of Mount Grace; the North Yorkshire Moors Railway — one of the world's busiest heritage lines — runs steam-hauled from Pickering over the moor to Grosmont and on into Whitby, calling at Goathland, a village that has played both Heartbeat's Aidensfield and Harry Potter's Hogsmeade. Walkers have their own institutions: the Cleveland Way horseshoes the scarp and coast, Wainwright's Coast to Coast ends its 300 kilometres at Robin Hood's Bay, and the 40-mile Lyke Wake Walk crossing must still be done inside twenty-four hours to count.

What's worth knowing before you go

The Esk Valley line from Middlesbrough to Whitby is the park's own railway — a rural survivor threading the northern dale, connecting at Grosmont with the steam line — while Pickering and Helmsley anchor the southern edge by bus from York via Malton. Late August is the heather; April is Farndale's daffodils; winter brings hard light and empty abbeys. Two cautions: the coast road's honeypots (Robin Hood's Bay, Runswick Bay) have park-and-walk parking only, and the open moor is navigationally blank in mist — the medieval waymark crosses (Ralph Cross, Fat Betty) exist because people died up here. The connoisseur's half-day is the Rosedale ironstone railway from Blakey Ridge: level walking at 400 metres, kilns like Egyptian ruins, and grouse exploding from the ling.