Walking Yorkshire : Ilkley Moor, Addingham Moor The first walk of the year, the weather is fantastic today, cold and crisp, still without a breath of a wind until you get onto the very top of the moor, perfect winter hiking weather. Home turf for this walk, around the well trod Ilkley Moor. Standing stones in the Darwin Millenium Gardens on the edge of Ilkley Moor. The wireless station at Whetstone Gate on the top of the moor. This is the edge of last summer's burn, but lots more damage has been caused to the moor by vehicles. If you can see in the photograph, there are numerous tracks and channels made by vehicles which have churned up a sizeable patch of the moor above Cowper's Cross. I have no idea why this should be, surely the ground can't have been dug up by vehicles fighting the fire, the ground was too hard for that. Only 4WD's and tractors could drive around up here, can anyone shed any light on this damage ? On other parts of the moor there is more ongoing damage caused by bikers, it's quite obvious that some people are out on the moor in wet conditions and they come downhill with their brakes on, skidding all the way. A group of five or six mountain bikers can easily tear all the grass off a path in this manner. There is quite a bit of this damage on the paths leading up the moor from the old reservoir building opposite the old college building. Burnt heather. Fire damage on Ilkley Moor. After last summer's moorland blaze there was some knee-jerk fundraising which gathered a pile of cash to go towards regenerating the moor. In my experience, nature tends to heal itself fairly well, granted, if theis were a forest then it would be handy to plant new trees, but on a moor, won't nature just find its own way ? Even in the worst parts of the burn there are signs of life. This is right in the worst part of the burn, and even in the middle of winter (or such winter as we've had anyway) nature is repairing itself, there is moss growing all over, small shoots of grass are showing here and there and tiny plants like this are begining to reclaim the black scar at the top of the moor. Perhaps te money raised last year would be put to better use building some decent quality paths like those on well walked hills in the Dales, to stop walkers and cyclists causing further erosion damage to parts of the moor. This is wreckage from a Halifax bomber that crashed on Ilkley Moor on Jan 31st 1944 after its crew became lost whilst trying to find Yeadon Airfield. The crash killed all the 4 Canadian crewmen onboard, the sole RAF member of the crew died from his injuries the next day in High Royds hospital. There is a memorial stone further on that says this....""When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow we gave life today". Sheep in a barn on Addingham Moorside, its compulsory to take photos of sheep you know. This walk was about 11 miles at a very steady pace, more of a stroll really, although I did get a sweat on plodding up Ilkley Moor. The weather made it perfect, if not for the hard frost then large parts of Ilkley Moor would resemble a marsh after all the rain that has fallen here in the past few weeks.