Earlier this week I was wandering along a spot called Beadlam Rigg. There’s no reason why you should know it, but it’s another one of those breathtaking landscapes that decorate this part of the world. And, of course, it owes its beauty to the underlying geology.
A narrow road takes you three miles up a steady climb all the way from Beadlam village, just this side of Helmsley. The road winds through pasture and occasionally arable fields. This is the dip slope of the Tabular Hills, all Upper Jurassic rocks in layers of limestone and grit. The pastures are on the lime-based lower slopes. The road comes to an end, as all good things must, and then you walk up for a mile or so into a piece of forest. This forest runs all the way along the top of these hills, in a belt stretching from Scarborough to Helmsley. It is planted on a band of infertile rock known as the Lower Calcareous Grit (LCG). The forests are there because the grit isn’t good for crops or pasture – Broxa, Langdale, Wykeham, Dalby and Cropton Forests are all planted on the same layer of grit.
The hard grit forms a ridge on top of an escarpment that winds across the landscape like a drunken snake. The scarp here is called Rollgate Bank but the same slope has a hundred names, from Jacob’s Mount at Scarborough, to Crosscliff in Dalby Forest, Bluegate Hill at Gillamoor and Rievaulx Bank above Helmsley.
I walked through the belt of forest and there it was: a view north across Skiplam Moor towards Bransdale, east towards Rudland Rigg and Farndale and west to Helmsley Moor and Bilsdale. Standing on top of the Upper Jurassic ridge, peering down over the Middle Jurassic moors, I was looking back over 20 million years of earth history. Then quite suddenly the sun came out – and time stood still.