Out & About …

… on the North York Moors, or wherever I happen to be.

Tag: incline

  • Incline Top

    Incline Top

    My morning constitutional today featured a one way run from Bank Foot to Clay Bank over Urra Moor. And to save a bit of time I used the old railway incline to ascend to the moor top. I’d forgotten how much of a slog it is. Nowadays, I am, more often than not, descending on…

  • Kepwick limestone quarry incline

    Kepwick limestone quarry incline

    The name of the old inn, Limekiln House, on the Hambleton Drovers’ Road, gives a clue to the industry which dominated the Tabular Hills escarpment above Kepwick. For it catered for the quarrymen as well as the drovers. Limestone has much used since pre-history as a building material, the Great Pyramid of Giza had facing…

  • Ingleby Incline

    Ingleby Incline

    The old railway incline for the Rosedale Branch ironstone railway. Almost a mile long with a maximum gradient of 1 in 5. A rake of trucks full of iron ore would be lowered down by a steel rope, which looped around a drum at the top and pulled up a rake of empty trucks. Speeds…

  • Cromford and High Peak Railway

    Cromford and High Peak Railway

    Stopped off in the Derwent Valley, a Unesco World Heritage site on account of its 18th/19th-century cotton mills considered to be the birth of the large-scale factory production. It was where Richard Arkwright introduced the latest technology at the time for spinning cotton. But ignoring the mills I headed up the 1 in 9 Sheep…

  • Halfway up the Incline

    Halfway up the Incline

    The halfway gate, good fresh snow and blue skies. Magic. The mile-long incline, maximum gradient 1 in 4½, came into operation in 1861 to transport ore from the Rosedale Ironstone Mines. At the peak of ironstone production 1000-1500 tons was hauled down daily, operations continuing throughout the night. The incline was self acting, that is,…

  • Botton Head, site of a WW2 air crash

    Botton Head, site of a WW2 air crash

    Climbed Botton Head onto Greenhow Moor in search of the site of a WW2 air crash. On 21 October 1940 an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Mk. V was returning to its base at RAF Linton on Ouse, just off the A19 north of York, from a raid on the Skoda factory in Czechoslovakia, crashing into the…

  • Nanny Meyer’s Incline

    Nanny Meyer’s Incline

    I saw the name on the map and I just knew I had to see. I had a few hours to kill in Durham so decided to drive up to the moors around the head of the Derwent Valley. The moorland around is bleak and lonely with just a scattering of farmsteads. So who was…

  • Kepwick Incline

    Kepwick Incline

    Kepwick is a small village on the western edge of the North York Moors. The moors above Kepwick are limestone and was extensively quarried. This incline was used to haul the stone 800′ down to the valley floor below. Presumably there would have been a bridge carrying the incline over the road Kepwick to Hawnby road.…

  • Beck Hole Incline

    Beck Hole Incline

    The bottom of the former railway incline from beck Hole up to Goathland. It was constructed by the Whitby and Pickering Railway in 1836 and was originally a horse drawn railway. The carriages were hauled up and down the hill using a system of water tanks. Later in 1865 a new route was constructed which…

  • Ingleby Incline

    Ingleby Incline

    Ingleby Incline, the familiar diagonal scar climbing the Cleveland Hills, was in operation between 1861 and 1929 and connected the North Eastern Railway at Battersby with the ironstone mines in Rosedale. It was a self acting incline, that is loaded wagons pulled descending under gravity pulled up empty wagons. Both rakes of wagons controlled by a…