Ingleby Incline Walk

History

The Ingleby Incline is the steep slope where the Rosedale Railway came off the moors and ran down to the main line at Battersby, and this circular walk goes from Battersby station through woodland and along a forest track to its foot, climbs it, follows the old railway for nearly a mile to Bloworth Crossing, and returns partly along the Cleveland Way. The National Park Authority says the incline is almost a mile long and mostly 1 in 5, too steep for steam engines, so it worked as a cable railway: loaded wagons going down on a rope wound round a large brake drum pulled empty wagons up. It says the incline was built in seven months in the 1860s by navvies using gunpowder and picks, and that if the cable snapped the wagons could have reached 113 mph.

The Authority's leaflet for the walk points out carvings in the rock, among them benchmarks, initials and a man in a stovepipe hat with a bird, which its walk page says the workers made, and the scattered stones of the drum house, some marked with Roman numerals. The incline was part of the Rosedale Railway, which the Authority says first opened in 1861 and closed in 1929 after carrying over 10 million tonnes of ironstone from Rosedale. The Authority's Land of Iron project, between 2016 and 2021, installed interpretation along the incline.