Wheeldale Lodge: From Shooting to Youth Hostel to Private Residence

My memories of Wheeldale Lodge are, regrettably, a jumble. One of the earliest involves the unremarkable joy of dunking sore feet in Wheeldale Beck after a needlessly long march across the Lyke Wake Walk. This was in 1969, and my 17-year-old self had been trudging for twelve and a half hours. The route comes down to the beck by the wall on the left in the photograph, as though making a half-hearted effort to be scenic.

At the time, Wheeldale Lodge was a popular youth hostel, a role it had taken on in 1947¹‘More Hostels for East Riding Walkers’ (1947) Hull Daily Mail, 08 Dec, 3, available: https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/apps/doc/GR3223273233/GDCS?u=ed_itw&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=1f16b8de [accessed 06 Oct 2021].. Before that, it was a keeper’s cottage. Judging by the assortment of vehicles littered outside, it seems to have gone back to that. Allegedly, it began life as a shooting lodge, because the moors needed yet another monument to aristocratic boredom.

In January 1989, still under the youth hostel occupancy, it served as a checkpoint for the Wheeldale Tandem race. The format was needlessly inventive—two runners per team, one went east, the other west, converging at Wheeldale before running in together to the finish at Goathland. That year, the winners took just under four hours. Someone on the east leg stumbled across a mortar bomb on the MOD’s old firing range. This caused a ripple of alarm, though I was entirely unaware, which probably says more about the route than it does about me²Whitby Gazette – Friday 20 January 1989.

Wheeldale itself sprawls over 1,500 acres of moorland, supposedly named for the wheel-like contortions of its beck. This explanation seems like a desperate attempt to justify a dull name. It was once within the so-called “Regard of Pickering Forest”, which, despite sounding ominous, was a court held every few years by a gaggle of knights who pretended to inspect boundaries and sniff out unauthorised houses. Since no one could legally fell timber there, the heavily wooded parts were about as profitable as fog³Hollings, Alice. A History of Goathland. North York Moors National Park. 1990..

Visible in the photograph is the so-called Roman Road, a stony stretch known as Wade’s Causeway. Supposedly part of a Roman route from Whitby to Malton, although this seems to rest more on hope than evidence. Some claim it is later. Others think it might be prehistoric, but no one seems terribly certain. It can just about be made out descending the nearer ridge to Wheeldale Gill.

• 1
  ‘More Hostels for East Riding Walkers’ (1947) Hull Daily Mail, 08 Dec, 3, available: https://link-gale-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/apps/doc/GR3223273233/GDCS?u=ed_itw&sid=bookmark-GDCS&xid=1f16b8de [accessed 06 Oct 2021].
• 2
  Whitby Gazette – Friday 20 January 1989
• 3
  Hollings, Alice. A History of Goathland. North York Moors National Park. 1990.