For hours the moor has been all around you, mile after mile of open heather under a wide sky, no house, no tree, no shelter. And then, on the long line of the ridge ahead, a low huddle of stone comes into view: chimneys, whitewashed walls, the promise of a fire.
This is the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge, one of the highest inns in all of England, and for the Coast to Coast walker it is the most welcome sight of the whole moorland crossing. The Lion stands alone at over four hundred metres, on the very roof of the North York Moors, and it has stood here since around 1553, in the reign of the Tudors.
For close on five centuries it has done exactly one thing: shelter travellers on a bleak and lonely height.
In the old days its guests were the working people of the moor, the drovers walking cattle to market, the miners who once dug ironstone and jet and coal from these hills, and above all the packhorse trains, long strings of laden ponies threading the ancient tracks between the moorland villages and the lowlands beyond.
For all of them the Lion was a fixed point in a wild place, a fire and a roof and a drink at the highest, hardest part of the road. Look for four things when you reach it. First, the building itself, long and low and thick-walled, built deliberately to hunker down against the wind, its rambling rooms and low beamed ceilings the shape of centuries of weather.
Second, look at the sheer emptiness all around, the great rolling sea of heather stretching away in every direction with barely a building in sight, and understand what an inn on such a spot has always meant. Third, on a clear day look out to the views, which on the best days run for many miles across the moors and dales, though this is a place where the cloud can just as easily close down to nothing.
And fourth, look for the old tracks and boundary stones near the ridge, the routes of the packhorse men and the markers that guided them, for you are walking one of the oldest highways of the moor. Here is what those packhorse trains really were. Before there were proper roads across these tops, almost everything that moved over the moor moved on the backs of ponies.
Sturdy little horses were tied nose to tail in long strings, sometimes twenty or more, each loaded with panniers of coal, lime, fish, wool or cloth, led by a driver on foot in all weathers.
They followed narrow, well-worn causeways marked by standing stones, and a high, remote inn like the Lion was a vital link in that chain, a place to rest the animals, warm the men and wait out the worst of the weather before pressing on. When you shelter here, gratefully, at the halfway mark of your own long crossing, you are doing exactly what travellers have done on this spot for hundreds of years.
A word on the moor itself. This is high, exposed country where the weather can change fast and the mist can swallow the path, so carry what you need, watch the sky, and keep your navigation sure between the shelter of one landmark and the next.
From the Lion Inn the Coast to Coast runs on along Blakey Ridge and then begins its long descent off the tops at last, and over the coming miles it drops you eastward down into the green dale of Glaisdale and the lovely old packhorse arch of Beggar's Bridge, next on your walk. One last look back over that endless heather, one last warmth at your back, and on across the roof of the moors. Walk safe.
