163km North York Moors Gravel weekender

Where the Moor meets the Sea - The Cinder Track, Ravenscar

Sea to Moor
A weekend of tough, but oh so rewarding gravel riding. Beginning in Scarborough, the route heads up the North Yorks Coast on the popular Cinder Track to Whitby. Expect great sea views around Ravenscar and Robin Hood’s Bay. After a re-fuel in Whitby, the route heads up the glorious Esk valley, before riding up onto the moor itself. Here you ride across Britain’s largest heather moorland and one of the world’s rarest habitats. It is truly spectacular, especially in August when the heather blooms. Apparently it is one of the most Instagrammed locations in Europe. Be that as it may, the riding on wide and perfectly formed gravel tracks is thrilling. Once across the moor, you are back into the rhythm of stiff climbs and almost abseil descents into charming valleys and delightful villages. Traditional pubs, great campsites and the odd shop await. The final leg is through Dalby Forest, on yet more smooth gravel tracks which take you back to Scarborough where a train is standing on platform 3 ready to take your weary but elated body and bike home.

Ride practicalities
START/FINISH: Scarborough DISTANCE: 164km TOTAL ASCENT: 2300m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: Gravel tracks and quiet back roads MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Scarborough, Whitby and a succession of stations in the Esk Valley LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: NCN 1 Hull to Scarborough, NCN 1 Scarborough to Middlesborough RECOMMENDED FOOD AND DRINK; Scarborough: The Bike and Boot Hotel, The Leeds Arms (no food, just good beer in a music/tv free traditional pub) ACCOMMODATION/CAMPING: Scarborough: The Bike and Boot Hotel, Cropton; The New Inn (BandB ,good pub with its own brewery and campiste Dalby Forest; Stonecross Camping (No noise after 10pm, rigorously enforced, children kept under tight adult supervision etc)

Ride the Route

Ride Notes
Scarborough is a raucous town, beloved by seagulls and Geordies. To enjoy the full flavour of the place, choose a bench on the sea front overlooking the wide bay. Ensure that you have Europop blaring out from an arcade of games consoles behind you and have a recently purchased box of fish and chips on your lap. Open the said box and see how long it’ll be before a black backed gull descends, its wings brushing your hair, it’s beak open as it helps itself to your supper. It’ll fly off before you’ve really processed what’s happened and will perch on a ledge on a building with flaking plaster whilst enjoying your chip(s). And once back in your hotel room, if the disco beat does not keep you awake, the gulls and their squawking certainly will.

Scarborough was the world’s first seaside resort. The idea of travelling to the seaside to bathe and breathe in ozone rich air began here in the late 18th century. The Grand Hotel was built to accommodate the thousands and was in the mid nineteenth century, the largest brick building in the world. Today, the the old lady’s fortunes are in decline. The Grand is more a hostel for gulls than for people. See them all lined up in their nests along the coving and ledges of the old hotel.

The Grand Hotel - home to seagulls and a few human guests

Leaving ‘Scarbados’ you ride on the Cinder Track to Whitby. It’s a twenty-one mile traffic-free delight and one of the most popular cycle routes in the country. You’ll be distracted by the views of the sea, of the sheep or buttercup filled pastures so you will not notice the deterioating surface beneath your wheels. The council had plans to re-surface the track a year or two back, but a group of dog-walkers set up an opposition group, fearing that cyclists would speed down the ‘super highway’. However, on your gravel bike, you’ll barely notice the dips and lumps.

A bike and a view; The Cinder Track, Ravenscar

Along the track, there is a gentle climb up to Ravenscar, to the Raven Hall Hotel, which was to be a Town Hall for the new resort. Developers laid fresh water pipes and sewage pipes and prepared a street pattern before someone nudged them and pointed out that the project was doomed to fail. The walk to the rocky beach was long and precipitous, the sea cold. The whole venture was called off before even larger sums of money were lost.

Whitby is one of the prettiest towns on the English coast. The abbey continues to pull in the Dracula fans, The Captain Cook trail, the historians, fishermen pull in their daily catch and the pedestrianised centre and photogenic harbour pull in many thousands of tourists keen to escape the North-East’s post industrial heartlands.

Once re-fuelled at one of the many cafés, you return to the Cinder track and ride across the five million bricks which make up the Larpool viaduct. It’s a vertiginous drop down to the Esk, which even Dracula noted in Bram Stoker’s tale; “The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which the view seems somehow further away than it really is.”

From the viaduct, you shoot downhill to the Esk valley, where you follow the National Cycle Network Route 165 (which connects Barnard Castle with Whitby). If you were under the impression that valleys were flat lands between hills, you will need to re-appraise your thinking. The narrow road resembles a fair-ground rollercoaster. To add to the adventure there are a couple of gravel tracks and a short hike-a-bike section. To off-set this, there are the views of a rich green vale and the brooding moor above it.

Past Kildale, you take the moorland track and what happens next will live long in your cycling memory. Once up the steep climb, you ride on a glorious track. Your tyres putter along the flat(ish), well surfaced path and there’ll be nothing above you other than an infinite sky and the moon. 75% of the world’s heather moorland is in England, of which 60% is in Yorkshire. You should ignore the calls of the many grouse - ‘goback, goback. goback’ - as they dart nervously away from you. In mid-August the moors are a spread of lilac and purple as the heather bursts into flower. So spectacular is the heather that the Moors are one of the most Instagrammed regions of Europe - or so I was informed in Scarborough.

The irony is that the moorland is a managed landscape. Grouse feed off heather. Landowners earn up to £3000 per gun per day’s shoot. By 2023, all 32 breeding pairs of Hen Harriers had been exterminated as they are regarded as a threat to the grouse. However, another seriously endangered raptor, the merlin which is the UK’s smallest raptor, live on. (grouse are too big a prey). As I rode, a merlin flew alongside me making light work of the stiff headwind.

You leave the moorland and almost abseil down a precipitous slope back into the warm embrace of the deeply rich green valleys. From now on, the route rocks and rolls up and down over some of the steepest hills you’ll ever encounter. Gorgeous villages come thick and fast - Hutton-le-Hole, Lastingham, Cropton (with its brewery, campsite and pub). There’s Levisham and Lockton. Each village separated by a monster hill and eye-watering descent.

If you’re familiar with German forests, Dalby Forest will seem familiar. Large flower-rich pastures are interspersed with sections of deep dark forest and you ride on the most perfect of gravel tracks. In fact, the surface is better than most UK roads. And as you ride, you half expect Little Red Riding Hood to be passing, or Snow White, or perhaps the prince on his way to kiss some sleeping princess. It is a magical forest, where light plays with shade, where birds sing and goshawks hunt the margins.

Eventually after many more hills and sublime tracks, you descend and the road takes you back to Scarborough. The seagulls will be eagerly awaiting your return, but you’ll probably be keener to head to Platform 3 where a train will be awaiting you, ready to take you back home after this tough but oh so very rewarding weekend away.

Every route on this website has been carefully researched as well as ridden. However situations on the ground can change quickly. If you know of changes to this route, or cafes, pubs and the like which you think other cyclists need to know about, feel free to share your thoughts below.

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