Pickering · GB

North York Moors National Park

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.