OS Explorer map 298, Nidderdale: Fountains Abbey, Ripon & Pateley Bridge – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post on 20th December 2023.
Google Maps location links: Long Eaton, Harrogate, Knaresborough, Bishop Thornton, Pateley Bridge, Brimham Rocks, Ripon, Masham, Kettlewell
I’ll write here about a trip that’s the fifth in what’s become an occasional series on this blog of “short trips with my parents just before/after Christmas” – see my posts about the Isle of Harris in 2017 (that one not so short), Exmoor in 2018, Ludlow in 2019 and Ross-on-Wye in 2021. Well, I did that again in 2023, heading off to a holiday cottage in Nidderdale with my parents for a few days just before Christmas!
My parents were driving up from their home in Northamptonshire, and we’d arranged for them to pick me up at Long Eaton station in the late morning, between Derby and Nottingham. That worked very well: the Cardiff-Nottingham CrossCountry trains stop there, and coming from my home in Moreton-in-Marsh, I can get on those trains with just one east change at Worcestershire Parkway. And it’s only just off the M1, which my parents’d be driving up anyway, so very convenient for them to collect me.
We’d be staying four nights in a cottage a little way to the west of Bishop Thornton, more or less exactly between Harrogate to the south, Ripon to the north and Pateley Bridge to the west – and just outside the Nidderdale National Landscape – as AONBs were recently renamed to. We drove on up there from Long Eaton, making stops on the way for a pub lunch in the amusingly-named village of Spofforth just south of Harrogate, and then to collect a pre-booked supermarket order in Harrogate’s branch of Morrisons.
I wanted to get in at least one walk alone at some point during the trip – my parents do also enjoy a good walk, but need to keep things fairly short and flat, so I usually like to make space for something alone too on trips with them. I ended up heading out for one on the morning of our first full day, planning to walk westwards from our cottage to the town of Pateley Bridge – which I could do entirely following the Nidderdale Way, as it actually passed right by our cottage.
It was a very nice walk! The upper reaches of Nidderdale, up past Pateley Bridge, are a pretty narrow valley rising to high moors on either side; but the area where I was starting – further east, and not in the valley of the Nidd itself – was gentler hilly farmland. I walked through that for a few miles, before ascending on to Brimham Moor, a smallish patch of moorland just a mile or so across in each direction – and also the home of the amazing Brimham Rocks, though I only got to those later in the holiday!
It wasn’t a hugely long walk – about seven miles – and the plan was that my parents would have a lazy morning, then drive over to Pateley Bridge to meet me at about 11:30am, for us to then go off and have the rest of the day together. Coming down from Brimham Moor, I was doing well for time, and walked off the path to sit and read behind a tree for a bit, which was nice!
One particularly notable point came soon after that, at a place where the path crossed a little river – the Fell Beck, according to my map – using a big old fallen tree. Like, the top of the tree had clearly been well-used as a path and it was in just the right place, so that was fun. After that came just a couple more miles of farmland, including passing Nidderdale Llamas, a farm where one can do “Llama walks“!
And I was soon back in Pateley Bridge, where the Dearest Progenitors were sitting in a café having had a drink and snack. We explored the town’s little high street for a bit – including its specialist hot chocolate shop, which I’d have sorely wanted to try if I hadnt just had a hot drink – and after that headed over to Ripon for lunch.
Now, despite this being the first time I’ve posted about this map area, I’ve actually been to this area of the country a couple of times in recent years before starting this blog; it’s just that those visits both solely saw me visiting areas of this map that are in the overlap with map areas I’ve visited before, so didn’t count under The Rules. I’ll mention those two outings in the Previous Visits section below.
I mention this now because the reason we went over to Ripon for lunch is that on one of these previous trips, staying in York for a couple of days with Vesper and my parents, we went to Ripon and discovered the excellent Realitea, an Indian café/restaurant/tearoom. Father Dearest really wanted to go back, and so we did! When we arrived, they said they’d have a table in fifteen minutes, and specifically recommended the charity shops over the road as somewhere to spend that time: a strong recommendation as we ended up buying a few things there, including Father Dearest buying a couple of little metal llamas which enamoured him so that he set them out on our lunch table immediately afterwards!
That evening, back at the cottage, it was time for a Christmas dinner! We’d be having one with family in a few days, but you can’t have too many Christmas dinners, so I’d volunteered to cook one for just the three of us. In a not very Christmassy turn, I’d planned to do a Wellington containing the components of an English Breakfast, something which I’d made successfully for me and Vesper a month or so before, having seen the idea on the internet. I had the slight problem, though, that the Morrisons collection had not provided the requested gluten-free puff pastry, and neither the Sainsburys nor the Booths (the “Northern Waitrose”) in Ripon had had any. So I ended up having to use gluten-free wraps instead, making it into a kind of Wellington-burrito hybrid – i.e. it was wrapped in tortillas, but inside that the filling – (veggie) sausages, hash browns, tomatoes, mushrooms and baked beans – then had a layer of (veggie substitute) bacon, an internal extra tortilla, and then a mushroom duxelles around that. I served it with roasties, carrots, sprouts, stuffing and gravy, and while it was far from my best, we still enjoyed it!
The next day, we visited the aforementioned Brimham Rocks, which I have to say was amazingly cool – I don’t know why I’ve never heard of them before, as I can’t think of anything like them in the country. It’s just a collection of really unique, weird rock formations which you can walk between and clamber around. I don’t really know how to describe them, so here are a load of photos!
That day we also visited Knaresborough, which is outside this map area (in area 289), so I won’t describe in detail, but here are some photos.
We also headed out of this map area on the next day, heading into the Yorkshire Dales for a morning walk from Kettlewell, visiting the Wensleydale Creamery, and having a late lunch in the town of Leyburn on the way back – all in map OL30.
And that’s about it! The next day was Christmas Eve, and we drove back to my parents’ Northamptonshire home, to have Christmas with family at my uncle’s house the next day – a comparatively small group of just six of us this year.
Previous visits
While this December 2023 trip was my first time properly visiting this map area since starting the blog, i.e. doing a trip that counts as a visit under The Rules, as mentioned above I’ve actually been there twice in recent times, just entirely within overlap areas. I don’t always write about visits like these in the Previous Visits section, but do sometimes choose to do so, and will tell you about these two now!
September 2020
The first of these trips was in September 2020. This was the pandemic year, and this trip happened in the first sufficient lull in the pandemic when my parents and I felt comfortable spending a few days together again, and did a short trip up here, staying in a holiday cottage to the southwest of Harrogate. I only visited places in map areas I’ve posted about before, so didn’t post about that trip before: our accommodation was in map 289, as is Harrogate itself, and I drove off one day for a walk in Kettlewell, in OL30.
We came to the Nidderdale map area, specifically to the overlap between that map and OL30, for a walk in upper Nidderdale, starting from the village of Lofthouse and heading north up the valley for a mile or so before returning down the other side of the Nidd.
It was a very nice walk! For some reason, I particularly remember the veggie lasagne with a very comprehensive side salad I had afterwards for lunch at Lofthouse’s Crown Inn – looking at the photo, it seems there were not just tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber and radish, but also a boiled egg, peas, and some apple, strawberry, grapes and walnuts!
July 2022
The second such visit was in July 2022, when Vesper and I had a short Yorkshire holiday in two halves: we spent two nights on our own in Hebden Bridge in the South Pennines, and then two nights in York with my parents. The York map area was a new one to me since starting on this blog, and I duly described the holiday in this post. As mentioned there, the four of us drove over to Ripon for a day trip from York, which is in the overlap between the Nidderdale map and map 299 – and as mentioned above, this is when we discovered the restaurant that we went back to on this current trip!
Ripon is a pleasant town, and as well as lunch and having a wander, we visited Ripon Cathedral, which. Compared to most other British cathedrals it’s a little small, but it’s still an amazing space. What especially drew Vesper and I there was the Anglo-Saxon crypt. Ripon has a 7th-century crypt, a twin of the one I visited later that year at Hexham, a part of the original church by Wilfrid. It wasn’t a burial chamber, but rather a place where relics were placed, to be visited by pilgrims.
There were also some nice miscellaneous Anglo-Saxon artifacts on display; we enjoyed some of the carvings on the choir stalls, and there was a fun little exhibit in one of the aisles consisting of a photograph of the inside of the nave of every English cathedral.
August 2013
The one proper Previous Visit, i.e. the one from before I started this blog, where I visited a place unique to this map area that counted as a visit under The Rules, was in August 2013.
A few times on this blog, I’ve mentioned the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game, which I used to play regularly with my school friends – and still do on rare occasions when we meet up in a place that’s well-suited for it, maybe once every couple of years. I used to use one half of my parents’ cellar as a game room, i.e. I had a game table permanently set up in there, all my models on shelves on the walls, and a little desk for painting.
In 2013, I bought on eBay a big model of Helm’s Deep – or technically in book canon, of the Hornburg and a small section of the Deeping Wall, with Helm’s Deep being the valley – to add to my gaming setup in the cellar. And I came to this map area to collect it from the seller’s house, in a village in the north of this map area, near the town of Masham. I drove the two and a half hours up with my friend Climbing Programmer to help me with the lifting – the seller had packaged it very securely into a giant, extremely heavy wooden crate.
We got it home and unloaded it successfully, and I was very happy with it!
Visiting all the maps! 