AS a youngster I often used to stay during the Summer holidays with relatives who owned a cottage in Fryupdale and therefore got to know the area round there quite intimately – Danby High Moor, Fryupdale & Glaisdale. In later years I walked both the Cleveland Way and the Lyke Wake Walk. It was therefore somewhat of a nostalgia trip when I started reading Paddy Dillon’s latest walking book containing fifty walks on the North York Moors.

The walks are distributed through seven regions within the park, enabling walkers to discover and appreciate the Tabular Hills, Hambleton Hills, Cleveland Hills, Northern Moors, High Moors, Eastern Moors and Cleveland Coast. For those who like a challenge, the course of the classic Lyke Wake Walk, crossing the national park from east to west, is also described. This is some of the finest walking in North Yorkshire.

Paddy Dillon, who has over 70 walking books to his credit, describes these walks in intimate detail, and includes sketch maps and numerous colour photographs throughout the 260 pages of the book. The walks range in distance from four to 13½ miles in length, with the exception of the Lyke Wake Walk which is 42 miles but even that is split into four separate walks enabling the walker to either walk it in its entirety over a long weekend or on four separate days. Most of the walks are circular but there are a few linear walks as well with suggestions for transport to return the walker to their initial starting point.

A number of the walks cover part of the Cleveland Way with an alternative route to return the walker to their starting point. A couple of weekends ago I tested one of the walks in this category on the coast from Cloughton with a party of youngsters and the route description was very easy to follow. This too brought back happy memories of my Cleveland Way walk back in the seventies.

Apart from the route descriptions themselves there are chapters on the history of the area, industries, transport details, accommodation, availability for refreshments, visitor and tourist information centres and details of maps to use in addition to those incorporated into the text. This is another fine book from Cicerone publications and well worth the £12.95 price tag, which works out at only 26p per walk.

John Burland