On this sunny Sunday, a glorious half-day on tiny lanes and dry-valley bridleways in one of my favourite parts of the world, the Yorkshire Wolds. The twenty-mile circuit involved a hidden nature reserve, an earthwork-artwork resembling a giant plughole, East Yorkshire’s highest point (spoiler: it’s not very), a pint of IPA, and hooligan cows.
I took the X46 bus to Pocklington. The hourly service takes bikes, and is a good way of getting straight to the edge of the Wolds from York. Resisting the siren call of the Black Bull, though not Coopland’s bakers, I followed the Way of the Roses up through Millington.
The valley-bottom road here goes past a secluded little nature reserve I’d not visited before, so I cycled up its gentle woods path.
It was full of birdsong, little of which I recognised, but luckily my Merlin app did. Chirping away were, it informed me, blackbird, blackcap, chaffinch, chiffchaff, coal tit, dunnock, nuthatch, robin and wren.
I’ve cycled the lane in Millington Dale many times, and had always wondered what the bridleway off to the north would be like. Today I found out.
Slightly bumpy, but a beautiful and quiet green groove along one of the Wolds’ many chalk valleys. A posse of slightly menacing-looking cows was guarding a gate, and I didn’t fancy arguing with them. Luckily a group of walkers turned up, one of whom was a cow warden at Potteric Carr, and had the rucksack-brandishing and shouting technique to disperse them, so I got through.
The bridleways here are just lovely, and very quiet. I came across maybe a dozen people who told me they hadn’t seen anyone all day.
A couple of narrow lanes – devoid of traffic, as usual – crossed the busy A166 and I turned left down a bridleway into the dale that spears south from the village of Thixendale.
It has two notable things to see: first, a dew pond. Water is scarce in these chalky parts, and dew ponds – bottomed with clay and filled with rainwater rather than dew – are there for thirsty livestock. Perhaps it makes the cows less tetchy.
The second notable thing is a large earthwork sculpture at the bottom of the dale where a footpath and bridleway cross on the Wolds Way long-distance footpath.
Waves and Time consists of metre-high ridges of earth carved out to form a sort of water-swirl.
The 2011 work by Chris Drury evokes the glaciers that formed this landscape – not rivers, hence name ‘dry valleys’. When the last of the meltwater spiralled down some sort of ultimate plughole, it must have looked like this.
Melting glaciers. Stuff disappearing down plug holes. Maybe there’s some relevance today.
I bumbled on west, up another giant winding green LP groove to rejoin tarmac. This took me south back towards Pocklington, and I passed East Yorkshire’s Highest Point. The official zenith of the county (and of the historic East Riding) is the trig point at 246m, out of public access just inside a reservoir. The peak, such as it is, is called either Garrowby Hill, Cot Nab, or Bishop Wilton Wold, depending on who you believe.
There are two mounds of earth about two metres high, clearly serving important H2O-supply function, so if you’re a Yorkshire Water employee clambering over them, then for you the highest point in East Yorkshire is 248m plus a bit.
If you’re a stickler for natural points only, then the summit of regular-geology East Yorks is the hillock on which this clump of trees stands, a few metres east of the waterworks. Prod a LIDAR-data website and you get a figure of 248m minus a bit for this, though again it’s private, being on farmland.
Anyway, I headed south down the long descent towards Givendale on another glorious virtually car-free lane, with sweeping views down to the plains south and east. I turned off left for my final bridleway of the day. This one, in Givendale, was more rolling fields than railway-cutting-like valleys. And there were more menacing cows with calves, some of which panicked me into grappling my bike over a fence for an emergency exit.
Back on firm road it was downhill all the way to Pocklington, with just enough time for a pint of IPA in the Black Bull before my X46 back home. You can see why I’m so keen on the Wolds.
MAP
