Newtondale: A Gorge Too Big for Its Stream

North Dale sits at the top end of Newtondale, a gorge that stretches all the way to Pickering. Newtondale is an oddity, or so everyone says, because the little Pickering Beck, which now trickles through it, could never have gouged out such a deep, narrow valley. At its tightest points, the valley is only 500 metres across. For those who struggle with scale, the steam engine on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway provides a helpful comparison. And for the aficionados, the train in question is being pulled by the Class A4 locomotive Sir Nigel Gresley.

There is no argument that Newtondale was carved by a vast flood of water at the end of the last ice age. What is up for debate is how that water got there in the first place. The traditional story is that an enormous glacial lake stretched north of the watershed, filling the Esk Valley and its tributaries before a sudden cataclysm sent millions of tons of water rushing south, scouring out Newtondale in just a few decades. The debris was conveniently dumped into the glacial Lake Pickering. The floodwaters are thought to have roared through at a rate of 10,000 cubic metres per second—ten times what the Thames manages when it is in flood.

Unfortunately, modern research has thrown cold water on this rather dramatic theory. Many now suspect that the ice sheets simply melted, releasing the water gradually rather than it being held back in vast lakes. This is, of course, a much less thrilling explanation, but who am I to argue one way or another.

For most of history, this upper part of Newtondale was left alone, largely because there was no reason to go there. Then, in the 1830s, the Whitby to Pickering Railway was forced through it. The construction ran into a significant problem at Fen Bog, where the ground was too wet and unstable to support a railway. The solution was both crude and effective: tree trunks were driven into the bog, covered with heather bound in sheep fleeces, and the railway was built on top. Remarkably, this rather makeshift engineering still supports the railway today.