One of the great medieval poems of England, which may have its origins in Pagan and early Christian mythology, is the Lyke Wake Dirge. The poem, in Cleveland Yorkshire Dialect, describes the passing of the soul after death over the wild Moors of North Yorkshire, where unless you have shown charity to others in your life, you will suffer eternal fire and damnation.
For centuries this great expanse of highland, rising up steep escarpments from the vales of York and Mowbray to form the Hambleton and Cleveland Hills, was known as Blackamoor, reflecting its grim and forbidding appearance for much of the year, except in late summer when, thanks to careful cultivation of heather for grouse shooting over the last three centuries, the Moors turn a rich and unforgettable purple.
This is far from being a natural landscape. Work by archaeologist and historian Frank Elgee described human occupation from Bronze Age times onwards, the intricate patterns of ancient tracks, barrows and burial mounds of this landscape. This may have been its ecological undoing, as millennia of tree cutting and overgrazing of what in postglacial times would have been open woodland, led to erosion of topsoils into narrow fertile valleys, named by later Anglo-Norse settlers as ‘Dales’.
It is this contrast between the desolate Moors and narrow, intensely green pastoral Dales such as, Ryedale, Bransdale, Newtondale, which feed into the richly fertile Vale of Pickering or Westerdale, Danbydale, Fryupdale into Eskdale that give the landscape its drama and variety.
Down to the sea and dinosaurs
And then there is the coast. At Boulby, the highest cliffs in England form part of an extended Heritage Coast land and seascape of high cliffs and steep gorges. Some of them embrace intimate fishing villages, such as Staithes and Robin Hood’s Bay, or that endlessly fascinating port of Whitby on the estuary of the Esk, rich in early Christian associations, whaling and the setting for Bram Stoker’s neo-Gothic Dracula.
The complex Jurassic-era rocks, forced upwards and tilted from the south in the great Continental uplift that created the high moorland, are both fossil and mineral rich. The so-called Dinosaur Coast contains not only footprints of dinosaurs but skeletons of ichthyosaurs and beautiful ammonites.
For centuries the coast was mined for alum, until the mid-19th century a vital fixing agent for textile dyes. Fossilised Jurassic monkey-puzzle trees produced semi-precious jet, once hugely popular for Victorian jewellery, its manufacturing still surviving as a Whitby craft.
Intensive mining
The North York Moors is Britain’s most intensively mined National Park. In one steep-sided valley, Rosedale, rich deposits of iron ore were discovered in the early-19th century, and extracted through a complex system of mines, kilns and standard gauge railways. This and coastal deposits around Redcar – the Land of Iron – led to Middlesbrough becoming one of Britain’s fastest growing industrial centres, developing from a small farming hamlet to become a major centre of iron and steel production in less than half a century.
In the mid-20th century onwards deep seams of potash for fertiliser were discovered at Boulby. This continues to be extracted from one of the deepest mines in the British Isles, extending far under the sea. At the recently sunk, but still controversial, Woodsmith Mine just south of Whitby, there are plans to extract thousands of tonnes of another fertiliser, polyanhydride, using underground tunnels to transport the mineral to nearby Teesport.
Moors marked by castles and abbeys
Human activity in and around the Moors, including Norman castles at Helmsley, Pickering, Scarborough and Benedictine Abbeys at Whitby, Cistercian at Rievaulx and Byland, and Augustinian at Guisborough, have left their mark on the landscape.
In the mid-19th century, the arrival of railways brought industrial activity and tourism. The horse-drawn Whitby-Pickering railway opened in 1836. Scarborough was connected to York from the 1840s and soon became one of England’s most popular resorts. It was linked to Whitby by a coastal railway, which after its closure became the popular cinder track footpath.
The winding Esk Valley railway between Whitby and Middlesbrough narrowly escaped Beeching closure, and now provides an amazing Victorian-era rural railway journey through spectacular scenery. Closed by Beeching in 1965, the line between Whitby and Pickering reopened as the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a steam heritage line a decade later. It is now one of the most impressive in the British Isles, and a major generator of tourist income for the region.
What of the future of this special part of Yorkshire in the turbulent, challenging times of the third decade of the 21st century? Tourism, now the single most important economic activity in the Moors, will be the first casualty of the coming recession. Small tourism businesses in towns such as Goathland, Helmsley, Pickering, and even Whitby are likely to suffer if regular visitors from Middlesbrough or York can no longer pay their gas bills.
A future landscape destroyed?
The National Park could be at risk if a government, determined to weaken planning regulations, allows commercial developers freedom to exploit natural assets. There could be potential mineral riches in the Moors for multinational corporations to exploit. Fracking, abandoned after protest at Kirkby Misperton, south of Pickering, could be back on the agenda, with a prime minister seemingly incapable of understanding the urgent need to curb carbon emissions.
Yet the protection and restoration work being done on the peatlands of the Moors, as major carbon storage assets, is of national importance as is the slowing down of river flows on tributaries of the Derwent, including the re-introduction of wild beavers in Cropton Forest, and the development of new forms of regenerative food production farming in the National Park. Not only are our National Parks helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change but are they are developing greenprints for human survival, testbeds of ideas to manage our natural environment for crucial decades ahead.
Protecting the Moors and our mental health
Vital to the mental and physical wellbeing of the urban population are the semi-wild green spaces of the Moors, most now public access land, and the intricate networks of public paths, including the magnificent 90-mile Cleveland Way national trail between Helmsley and Filey along the crests of hills and coast. When foreign holidays are no longer affordable, a week’s walking, cycling or camping in the North York Moors still will be.
The Moors are superbly served by the summer seasonal weekend Moorsbus network, one of the best integrated leisure public transport networks in any UK National Park, although scandalously underfunded even by the park authority. Yet for those on low incomes, it is a cheap (free for senior citizens), affordable lifeline.
But this sustainable access to the Moors also faces serious threats. Not only is it vital for present and future generations that Yorkshire’s countryside is protected from exploitation, but its sustainable forms of access must be maintained. Current government policies inevitably mean savage public sector spending cuts to pay for lower taxes for the wealthy. This leaves the North York Moors and other National Parks vulnerable to exploitation and far less accessible. We need citizen action to protect them.
