Tabular and Hambleton Hills

Here you will find a landscape dominated by large flat rectangular fields, divided by long, straight drystone walls built of thin slivers of local limestone or hawthorn hedges. But around the villages the smaller, narrow mediaeval strip field patterns still persist.

The traditional farm buidlings are very much a part of the landscape. Their pale limestone walls and red pantiled roofs are characteristic of this part of the National Park.

Some of the land in this area was converted from moorland only late in the twentieth century particularly along the A170 road between Sutton Bank and Helmsley and on the northern "nab ends" of the Tabular Hills escarpment. Small pockets of little improved limestone grassland remain, particularly on the steep valley sides.