A short history of the valley

Before the villages

People have lived on the moors above the Esk for at least six thousand years. The heather moorland itself is largely their creation, cleared of forest by Bronze Age farmers whose burial mounds still dot the skyline, and crossed by ancient trackways such as Wade's Causeway on Wheeldale Moor. Stone crosses like Ralph Cross above Castleton later marked the routes across the tops.

Monks and manors

After the Norman Conquest the valley passed to a handful of great landowners: the de Brus family at Danby, whose castle earthworks survive at Castleton, and the monasteries of Whitby, Guisborough and Rievaulx, which farmed the dales and built the first bridges and paved trods that walkers still use. Danby Castle, built in the 14th century, was later the home of Catherine Parr before she married Henry VIII. The Danby Court Leet, a manorial court dating from this period, still meets there.

Faith and persecution

The remote moorland parishes clung to the old Catholic faith long after the Reformation. Nicholas Postgate, born at Egton Bridge around 1596, served the scattered Catholic families of the moors in secret for more than thirty years, walking the dales in disguise, until he was betrayed and executed at York in 1679 at the age of 82. St Hedda's Church at Egton Bridge, built in the 1860s, is his memorial.

Bridges and packhorses

For centuries the valley's goods moved by packhorse over stone causeways and single-arch bridges. Beggar's Bridge at Glaisdale (1619), Duck Bridge at Danby and Hunter's Sty Bridge at Westerdale are the finest survivors, and the trods through Arncliffe Wood show how the paths were paved.

Iron and railways

Everything changed in 1836, when George Stephenson's Whitby and Pickering Railway opened, with horse-drawn carriages hauled up the incline from Beck Hole by rope. Grosmont, a hamlet, became an industrial village when ironstone was found during the building of the railway tunnel; furnaces roared there until the 1890s. The line from Whitby along the valley to Middlesbrough opened in stages between 1865 and 1875, bringing the stations that the villages still use.

The modern valley

The Pickering line closed in 1965 and was reopened by volunteers in 1973 as the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, now one of the busiest heritage railways in the world. The Esk Valley line survived the same era of closures and carries walkers, commuters and schoolchildren today. The North York Moors National Park was created in 1952, and the valley's farming, tourism and community life go on side by side.