Miles without Stiles: Hambleton Drove Road

History

This short out-and-back walk follows a stretch of the Hambleton Drove Road along the escarpment of the Hambleton Hills. The National Trails website's page for the walk puts the start where the road from Kepwick meets the Drove Road, then heads north along it to the ruins of Limekiln House, once an inn serving the drovers, where a bridleway turns off to a view over Thorodale. It says the road has been used for thousands of years, with flints, axes and pottery from the Stone Age found along it, and that in the 18th century Scottish cattle drovers used it to bring vast herds across England to market towns, as far as London.

An archaeological report written for the North York Moors National Park Authority in 2010, after drainage work on the road near Cold Kirby, says there is no definite date for its origins: some writers see it as part of a major prehistoric trade route, others as a medieval road. It names documents mentioning the road as a landscape feature from 1153, one of 1209 that calls it the main road to Cleveland, and a map of 1598, and says it also seems to have marked a boundary.