Yorkshire Wolds Way

Hessle → South Cave

Distance: 13.38 miles
Ascent: 381 metres
Duration: 4 hours 34 minutes

Yorkshire, part II
« Not walked | Not walked »

The Yorkshire Wolds Way starts on the banks of the Humber, in the land of cream telephone boxes. We've been here before, on our coast walk. Back then it took us seven days to walk 105 miles to Filey along the coast. This week the Yorkshire Wolds Way should get us back there in five days, by the shorter 89 mile inland route.

We may be broadly in the same part of the country as the Cleveland Way, but the landscape is quite different. The limestone escarpment is replaced by gently rolling chalk downland, the high moorland by huge arable fields. Thankfully, the weather has moved on too, with a real sense of spring in the air.

One charming link with earlier in the week is at All Saints, Brantingham. Standing in the churchyard are two wooden grave markers, quite simple in design but beautifully aged. Seventy years ago these were carved by Robert Thompson of Kilburn, whose workshop still produces furniture and other wooden objects, each adorned with a signature carved mouse. The ways these grave markers are slowly weathering and decaying fits perfectly with their purpose; before too long they too will have returned to the earth from which they were crafted.

We'll be keeping an eye out for more of Thompson's work as we make our way across the Wolds this week.