Miles without Stiles: Ingleby Incline

History

This walk starts at Battersby station, goes on roads and then a forest track to the foot of the Ingleby Incline and climbs it. The National Park Authority describes the incline as one mile long at a gradient of 1 in 5, challenging and suitable only for fit walkers or experienced mobility scooter users. It was the steep slope where the Rosedale Railway came off the moors and ran down to the main line at Battersby; the Authority says it was mostly 1 in 5, too steep for steam engines, so wagons were worked by a cable railway in which loaded wagons going down on a rope wound round a large brake drum pulled empty wagons up, and that navvies using gunpowder and picks built it in seven months in the 1860s.

The Authority's walk page and its Ingleby Incline leaflet point out carvings in the rock, among them benchmarks, initials and a man in a stovepipe hat with a bird, and the remains of the drum house at the top. The Rosedale Railway, 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.