Can You Visit Lake Eskdale?

It is hard to imagine it today, but 10,000 years ago, much of the area we now know and love as the North York Moors was covered by an enormous lake.

Lake Eskdale was 11 miles long and 400ft deep!

It encompassed the whole of the upper valley of the River Esk from above Grosmont; and the side valleys of Danbydale, Fryupdale and Glaisedale were all also flooded.

The lake had been formed when the 1,000-ft thick continental ice-sheet that covered much of Europe and Britain began to melt at the end of the last Ice-age.

Map Showing the Location of Lake Eskdale and Lake Pickering.

The Ice sheet never managed to cover the higher ground of the upper plateau of the North York Moors.

The melt water was trapped by giant morains and the side of the ice-sheet itself pushing up the lower Esk Valley over the top of the land that is now modern day Whitby, Ruswarp, Sleights and Grosmont.

But eventually, these natural dams in the lower Esk Valley could hold the water back no more!

It burst out in a catacysmic torrent; sending millions of tons of water to cut the deep gorge that is modern day Newtondale.

An early nineteenth century visitor to the Moors poetically described the meltwater gorges he saw as "furrows on the aged cheek where tears have ceased to flow."

Ewe Crag Slack and Lake Gormire are other landscape features which were carved by the flowing melt-waters across the North York Moors; and you can see deposited Eskers on Guisborough and Stanghow Moor near Hob Cross - formed by meltwaters flowing under the ice-sheet itself.

You'll Discover Glacial Eskers on the Moors Near Hob Cross.

The melt water from the North York Moors flooded outwards to the South across the low-lying landscape that is now the Vale of Pickering.

And that Vale became a lake in its own right before the waters eventually receeded - leaving the highly fertile soils that make Farmers in the area so wealthy today.

It all must have been the most amazing sight!