AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The North York Moors is one of England's great upland wildernesses — a sweeping 1,436-square-kilometre landscape of purple heather moorland, wooded river valleys, a 26-mile Jurassic coastline and villages that look untouched by time. Designated a National Park in 1952, it offers an extraordinary range of experiences: heritage steam trains climbing through glacial dales, medieval abbeys dissolved into haunting ruins, a Dark Sky Reserve where the Milky Way blazes overhead, and the 109-mile Cleveland Way tracing cliff-tops and moorland in an arc from the sea to the escarpment.↗↗
With more than 2,250 kilometres of public rights of way, over 800 Scheduled Monuments and woodland covering nearly a quarter of the park, the North York Moors rewards everything from a gentle afternoon stroll beside a waterfall to a week-long multi-trail trek. It is a place where you can hear curlews calling across open moor in the morning and watch grey seals hauled out on coastal rocks by the afternoon.↗
Moorland, Coast and Woodland
The park's name hints at its defining feature: vast expanses of open heather moorland, 44,000 hectares strong and designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its rare heathland habitat. Come late summer, the moors ignite in shades of purple as the heather blooms, while in other seasons the landscape shifts to russet, gold and green. Below the moorline, wooded river valleys — the dales — cut deep into the sandstone, creating sheltered microclimates where waterfalls plunge into mossy gorges and rare birds feed in the undergrowth.
