Forge Valley

About trip

Time: 1.75 Hours Terrain: Moderate. Description: Here is nature’s engineering on the grand scale. The deeply wooded gorge of Forge Valley is the ‘unnatural’ route of the Derwent, its real course being that now used by the flood prevention scheme known as the Sea Cut, which follows a wide valley bottom in a direct line to the sea. Towards the end of the last Ice Age, when the still frozen North Sea held back melt waters from the land, the Derwent had nowhere to go other than through a narrow side valley to the south. Such was the volume of water flowing through this minor valley that it deepened and when the sea eventually thawed, the river continued on its new course, flooding what is now the Vale of Pickering. The Sea Cut, dug in the mid 19th century, reduced the danger of flooding and greatly improved land in the vale.