I love walking. As a Cotswolds countryside resident, my once-concrete jaunts across east London have been swapped for crunchy grass stomps through cow-laden fields or floating across rolling hills just out my front door. I also love art. Exhibitions and retrospectives are often what dictate my travels. A recent dash on the Eurostar brought me to a speedy 48-hour whip around the late David Hockney exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, in between long bistro meals and a snoop around the city’s latest new hotel opening.
So when a few art-obsessed friends returned from what they called the most incredible walk of their lives up in the North York Moors, but said that they couldn’t really tell me why, I was immediately intrigued. I began researching and uncovered an outdoor art walk where tickets to gain access to were as hard as heading to Glastonbury. The walk is, rather intriguingly, called Hanging Stones.
I’d heard about artist Andy Goldsworthy from my mother. The contemporary English land artist has been shaping, morphing and discerningly using his hands to form large scale works using natural materials we might often overlook in everyday life: stones, snow, rock, leaves, iron, twigs, mud and more. One of his most talked-about pieces involved transporting 13 one-tonne snowballs from Scotland and placing them on the streets of London during a hot summer’s day. He challenges and inspires conversation about our world and its precious land, and for his ongoing project up in Yorkshire – commissioned by the David Ross Foundation – he shifts the focus to the raw beauty of the Moors.
To get tickets, eager hikers need to set reminders to check the website. Slots open at hangingstones.org – it’s currently booked out for the rest of the year, but new releases come out regularly. It costs £10 per adult; under-18s and students go free. There’s a maximum of four groups of six allowed each day. On the day, collect your laminated map and keys from Sevenford House B&B, then head to the Milburn Arms in Rosedale Abbey where the circular walk begins and ends. Allow five to six hours… you’ll need it, and wear proper boots (once you have your slot, I’d advise against trying to change it, so prepare for all weather conditions) and bring your own food and water – there are no facilities en route.
My husband and I set off up north for a six-mile hike through farmers’ fields and dormant heather hills to to pick up an instruction guide and a set of dangling keys… Here’s everything we found along the way.
