Middleton Woods and Nesfield from Ilkley

The route

From Riverside Gardens the route runs east along the Wharfe for a kilometre, crosses to the north bank and climbs away from the water at Curly Hill by 1.3km. That is the only real gradient of the day and it is done inside a few hundred metres.

Middleton Woods

By 1.9km you are into the trees. Middleton, Coppy, Stubham and Hudson woods together form the largest remaining ancient semi-natural woodland in West Yorkshire, 38 hectares of it, left to Bradford Council in 1937 by a wool merchant named Arthur Hentzen. The running is soft and rooty on broad tracks and narrower paths, with stream crossings and a few flights of rough steps. In late April and early May the bluebells are the reason anyone comes, and there is wild garlic, wood anemone and wood sorrel in with them. The high point of the route, 180m, arrives at 2.7km on open ground above the trees.

Nesfield and the river

The route drops west out of the woods to Nesfield at 4.2km, a hamlet of a few houses on the north bank road, then turns back southeast on field paths and riverside track. It recrosses the Wharfe at Ilkley Old Bridge at 7.3km. That seventeenth-century packhorse bridge is the official start of the Dales Way, which runs 78 miles from here to Bowness-on-Windermere, and it is a good deal older than anything else on this route bar the trees. The last few hundred metres follow the river back to the car park.

Who it suits

This is the route to hand someone who has never run off road. It is short, the paths are obvious for nearly all of it, it never gets more than about 110m above the river, and there is a cafe, a playground and a toilet at the finish. It is also the obvious wet-weather or short-daylight option in Ilkley when the moor is a bog.