North York Moors National Park
 

Discover The Place

60 things

 

60 things that make the North York Moors special place

 

It has:

 

  1. The largest continuous expanse of heather moorland in England – 44,000 hectares
  2. The highest cliffs on the east coast of England, at Boulby
  3. The deepest mine in Europe, at Boulby, 1100m
  4. The ‘finest view in England’, at Sutton Bank
  5. One of the best places for star gazing as it has some of the darkest skies in England
  6. The tallest lime tree in Britain, at Duncombe Park
  7. The steepest public road in England, 1 in 3 at Rosedale’s Chimney Bank
  8. The least rainfall so the driest National Park – so the best place for a holiday!
  9. The greatest concentration of ancient and veteran trees in northern England
  10. The oldest Christian monument in England - .Lilla Howe.
  11. The most woodland and forest of all National Parks in England
  12. The earliest large scale English chemical industry – alum
  13. The newest species of bacteria – well, new to science! It’s thought to be altering the structure of the coastal cliffs making them more susceptible to weathering.
  14. The northern most colony of the Duke of Burgundy butterfly in Britain, our scarcest butterfly.
  15. The southern most place in Britain where you can see dwarf cornel, an arctic-alpine plant.

And did you know?

 

  1. The National Park is twice as big as the Isle of Man – 1436 sq km (554 sq miles) in area.
  2. Fewer than 24,000 people live here but more than 6 million visitors come here each year.
  3. If you walked all the rights of way, 1408 miles, it would be like walking from here to Naples!
  4. The highest point is Urra Moor at 454 metres.
  5. Lake Gormire is one of just four natural lakes in Yorkshire, (the others are Hornsea Mere, Malham Tarn and Semer Water)
  6. The river Esk is one of just seven rivers in England that has the rare pearl mussel
  7. This is Jurassic Park! All the rocks were formed between 190 and 135 million years ago.
  8. There are approx. 1500 boundary stones and crosses in the North York Moors.
  9. 80% of the National Park is privately owned; the National Park Authority owns less than 1%.
  10. The biggest single employer is Boulby Potash Mine - 800 people.
  11. The world’s first cut price railway excursion ran from Grosmont in 1839.
  12. The oldest surviving Gooseberry Show in the country is held at Egton Bridge (established 1800).
  13. Moorsbus saves over 1 million car miles every year and 400 tons of carbon emissions.
  14. The National Park Authority has just 120 staff but 800 volunteers help to look after the National Park.
  15. The Yorkshire Gliding Club at Sutton Bank counts aviation ace Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia, as one of its former members.

And it has some great connections:

 

Captain James Cook –Britain’s finest explorer and surveyor

William Scoresby – inventor of the crow’s nest

William Smith – pioneer of English geology and creator of the first geological map

Peter Walker – author of the stories behind Heartbeat

Cardinal Basil Hume – Archbishop of Westminster and Headmaster of Ampleforth College

Catherine Parr – wife of Henry VIII lived at Danby Castle

James Herriot – author Alf Wight wrote about his life as a vet on the farms around Sutton Bank

Harold Wilson -  Prime Minister for seven years between 1964 and 1976, chose Rievaulx for his title when he became a peer, becoming Baron Wilson of Rievaulx

Ian Carmichael – loved by the nation as Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey made his home here

Lawrence Dalagllio threw a rugby ball here! Well, he went to school at Ampleforth College so we expect he managed to throw it across the road into the National Park!

Anthony Gormley, best known for the Angel of the North, also went to Ampleforth

Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, Chris Rea and ‘One Night Only’show that the North York Moors inspires musicians too

Grp Capt. Townsend shot down the first German bomber on English soil in World War II at Bannial Flat Farm, near Whitby

Laurence Sterne, author of the classic 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, lived at Shandy Hall in Coxwold

Mountaineer Alan Hinkes, the only Briton to have climbed all of the world's 8000-metre peaks, cut his climbing teeth on the crags of the North York Moors

So, you can be amazed:

 

  1. The North York Moors was the only area of northern Britain not actually covered by a glacier in the last ice age
  2. It is England’s largest SSSI
  3. It has one of the first Local Nature Reserves in the country: Farndale in 1955
  4. It is a Butterfly Survival Zone – one of just 20 in the UK and one of 5 in National Parks
  5. There are two National Nature Reserves  - Forge Valley and Duncombe Park
  6. You can find 21 species of orchid here…
  7. …and the highest density of breeding curlew and lapwing on open moorland in the UK
  8. It has more Listed Buildings than any other National Park in the UK – 3014
  9. There are over 700 Scheduled Monuments (that’s a third of the number in the whole of Yorkshire) and one of the largest Scheduled Monuments in the country – Levisham Moor
  10. There’s an important concentration of pre historic rock art
  11. The 26 mile coastline of the National Park is a Heritage Coast
  12. The Cleveland Way was the second National Trail to be designated (after the Pennine Way)
  13. You can holiday in a restored pigsty near Robin Hood’s Bay
  14. The North York Moors is home to the UK's world leading Dark Matter research project.  Scientists hoping to be the first to detect the 'stuff' that they think make up most of the mass in the Universe run particle detection experiments 1.1km underground at Boulby mine
  15.  The most horrible job ever in the North York Moors?  Collecting pee for the alum industry! And guess who did it … children of course! (Alum was used in dyeing cloth.)