The location furthest from home that we visited on our final Moorsbus trip of 2024 was the Moors Centre at Danby. The buildings were once used as a hunting lodge, but they are put to much better uses now. As well as tourist info, there is a shop, a Moors exhibition, an art gallery and a cafe.
Outside there is a new adventure playground for the children, cleverley designed to allow access to both the lower and upper parts for children in wheelchairs.
The grounds themselves are pleasant to walk round, and there is now a new trail of seven mosaics scattered around the grounds. This collage shows three of them.
They are rather abstract, but are intended to make you stop and look around and think about what you can see around you. Each has a thought provoking commentary with it. For example the commentary for the central mosaic in the collage reads: "The moment you can see for miles - In the distance you see Danby Castle, a magical place to explore surrounded by fields cut through with geometric shapes of hedge and stone. This valley is full of these forms, with shadows cast and lines stretching for miles. You can see the hills, the gullies and cuts in the land over time. This view is both ancient and ever changing.”
I've no idea how many times I've been to the Moors Centre at Danby, but we have finished quite a few walks from the high moors into Eskdale there. A few years ago there was a direct bus back to York from there at around 5pm, giving a ride over the high moors that we had spent the day walking, but sadly that one hasn't operated in recent years. However, there are new routes available now that weren't then, so there is something and somewhere new each year to explore.
lovely capture