The path steepens, the heather falls away, and suddenly you are among giants: a great tumbled heap of dark, weather-carved rock, some of it rearing high above your head, the biggest outcrop on the whole North York Moors. This is the Wainstones. Behind you the Cleveland plain spreads out like a green map to the sea.
Ahead, the Coast to Coast threads up through the boulders themselves, and for a few exhilarating minutes you must use your hands as well as your feet. The Wainstones are an outcrop of hard sandstone, a coarse gritstone that caps the high escarpment of the Cleveland Hills at the northern rim of the moors.
For millions of years wind, frost and rain have gnawed at this stone, wearing the softer beds away and leaving the tougher blocks standing in the strange, rounded, top-heavy shapes you see around you. The result is the largest crag on the North York Moors, and long a favourite of rock climbers, who come to test themselves on its steep faces.
For the Coast to Coast walker it is the dramatic high point of a switchback day spent riding the rollercoaster of the Cleveland escarpment, up and over one steep summit after another along the very edge of the hills. Look for four things as you climb through them.
First, the shapes of the rocks themselves, sculpted by the weather into overhangs, clefts and rounded towers, some balanced in ways that look barely possible. Second, look back, north and west, over the great flat sweep of the Cleveland plain and the Tees lowlands beyond, a view that on a clear day runs for many miles toward the distant hills and the sea.
Third, watch for the climbers who so often work the faces here, roped and chalked, moving slowly up the vertical rock; give them room and enjoy the spectacle. And fourth, look at the line of the path itself, the way it picks its steep, rocky course straight up through the boulders, a genuine little scramble that is one of the most memorable stretches of the entire crossing. Here is a thing to notice as you go.
The word "Wain" is an old English word for a wagon or a cart, the same word you find in the old country name for the constellation we now call the Plough, "Charles's Wain". So these are, in the old tongue, the wagon stones, and you can imagine why: this line of hills, with its high crossing points, was for centuries a route for carts and packhorses moving between the moors and the lowlands.
The great rocks stood as landmarks over that ancient traffic, unmissable on the skyline, guiding travellers along the edge just as they guide you now. Every time you read a name like this on the map, you are reading a fragment of the working life of the people who crossed these hills long before there was a footpath with a name. A word on care.
This is a real scramble over rock that can be slick in rain and exposed to the wind on the edge, so take your time, test your holds, mind your footing on the steep ground, and in poor visibility keep the path carefully in view. There is no shame in taking the easier line around the worst of the rock if the day is wild; the hills will wait.
From the Wainstones the Coast to Coast rides on along the switchback edge and then strikes out east across the wide, empty heather of the high moor, and over the coming miles it carries you toward a lonely, welcome light on the skyline: the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge, next on your walk. One last look back over the plain, one last scramble down through the boulders, and away across the tops. Walk safe.
