Rosedale Abbey, a charming village in the North York Moors, was once home to a small 12th-century Cistercian priory. In the 19th century, it thrived during the iron mining boom, leaving behind historic kilns and railway remnants. Today, it offers visitors stunning scenery, rich history, and excellent walking trails.
Image: Rosedale East Mines By Patrick Chambers
The North York Moors have been continuously inhabited by humans for at least 10,000 years, when Stone Age people began settling the area after trudging across the land bridge that joined England to Europe. Of course they weren’t moors back then but were instead, part of the huge, virgin forest that covered most of the country. As different waves of Mesolithic, Neolithic and finally Bronze Age people settled and used the land, the forests slowly vanished, giving way to the moors that we know and love today.
During Celtic times the land was ruled by the fierce Brigantes, who were a long source of trouble for the Romans when they ‘conquered’ England and built a fort just down the road in Malton. From here a number of roads radiated out across the country, including the Wades Causeway, which led north-eastwards over the Vale of Pickering and across the moors to the North Sea coast. The important remains of Cawthorne military camp or practice ground lie between Rosedale and Pickering.
After the Romans left and Romano Celtic resistance to invasion was eroded, the area was settled by Angles, Saxons and Jutes who gave many of the villages on the moors their names.
In the ninth century, Viking raiders began to attack the Yorkshire coast eventually establishing the Danelaw, which made much of the East of England a Danish kingdom with its political centre based at York. They introduced their language to the region, elements of which still remain in the local dialect, and renamed a number of settlements. It seems probable that Rosedale’s name has Viking origins, being a derivation of “Rossi”, which could be a personal name or the word for horse. Another possible root is the word “rhos”, which meant moor. So no roses anywhere.
The Abbey part is a bit of a misnomer too, as the “abbey” ruins that the name refers to are actually the remains of a Cistercian Priory, a small religious house as opposed to an abbey which held a larger community of monks or nuns. The small group of nuns who inhabited the priory from about 1154 to 1536, were probably the first people to farm sheep commercially in the region. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536 brought an end nearly four hundred years of history.
The old priory building was gradually dismantled over many years and some of the stone was used to rebuild a new church in 1839, on the site of the original priory. One staircase turret of the old priory can still be seen however, just outside the west door of the church.
Locally sourced iron ore has been processed on the North York Moors since medieval times but the discovery of high-grade magnetic ironstone in Rosedale during the 1850s saw the dale’s population explode, growing from around 700 to 3,000 in just two decades.
A railway soon followed carrying iron ore from Rosedale down onto the Cleveland plains, and for seventy years Rosedale was a noisy, dusty and active part of industrial Britain. The mines shut in the 1920s but many impressive and nationally important industrial ruins still line the valley today, and the spectacular scenic route of the railway can now be followed on foot all of the way round Rosedale, across the top of Farndale and on through open moorland to the dramatic Greenhow incline. 2026 is the centenary year of the closing of the Rosedale ironstone mines in 1926, the end of the Rosedale’s contribution to the Industrial Revolution.
Every year since 1871, Rosedale Show has been a social and agricultural highlight in the dale’s calendar. It is one of the oldest in North Yorkshire, attracting around five thousand visitors annually. The history archive has a display at the show each year.
Originally formed in 2008 as the Rosedale History Society, the archive now holds a vast amount of information on Rosedale, covering our social and industrial history. Currently, we hold informal quarterly meetings at the Village Hall/Updale Reading Room in March, June, September and December. Contact rosedalehistory@hotmail.co.uk for further information.