Cleveland Way: Bloworth Crossing to Kildale

Bloworth Crossing and the Ironstone Railways

The high North Yorkshire Moors can seem like an utterly natural environment, untouched by human hand since time immemorial. It is therefore somewhat of a surprise to discover that a railway once ran over the high tops.

The Rosedale Railway ran for eleven miles from ironstone mines in Rosedale to the Stockton to Whitby line at Battersby Junction. A 1-in-5 incline was needed at Ingleby to pull the wagons up hundreds of metres onto the moors, the weight of loaded wagons pulling empty ones up. The railway opened in two phases: a narrow-gauge line to above Ingleby opened in 1858, which the NER rebuilt to standard gauge and extended to Rosedale three years later. The mines closed in 1925, and the line four years later.

It is odd to think of steam trains chugging across the top of the Moors, and the heart attacks that locals, the park authority, and visitors might have at any attempt to reintroduce such a line nowadays. Yet the old line has becomes a useful footpath across the moors, and has mostly merged into nature. Man’s effect on nature is not necessarily long-lived.

The Cleveland Way crosses the course of the old railway at Bloworth Crossing.

Kildale, its station and the railway line

Kildale is a small hamlet nestling on the northern flanks of the North York Moors. It has a church, a tearooms, and a railway station on the Esk Valley line.

The Esk Valley railway runs from Middlesbrough to Whitby; it is all that remains of a network of railway lines across North Yorkshire, including the preserved North Yorkshire Moors Railway. The stretch of line between Battersby (a little way west of Kildale) and Grosmont was built by the North Yorkshire and Cleveland Railway, a short-lived affair that opened in 1858, but which was soon taken over by the North Eastern Railway. It seems slightly odd that this lengthy, remote line, whose only large settlement is Whitby, survived the Beeching Cuts. But locals must be glad that it was.