Along the Gypsey Race

30.03.2026

I began my two day hike in the heart of the East Yorkshire Wolds in the village of Duggleby. From here I would follow a mysterious chalk stream that flowed east above and below ground twenty five miles to the seaside town of Bridlington and out into the North Sea. The Gypsey Race had been central to settlements and monuments along it’s route from Neolithic times and present day villages still remained along it’s route.

The true source of the stream actually starts in a copse of dense trees just south of the road from Warren Le Street to Duggleby, but I wanted to start my walk from the burial mound of Duggleby Howe three hundred yards south of Duggleby. The archeologist John Mortimer had excavated the mound in 1890 and found skeletal and pottery remains deep down in the chalk below it. From the top of the six metre high mound the shallow valley can be seen disappearing off to the east. In the green fields around, long grass was rippling from a westerly wind and just beyond I could see glint of the stream heading in the same direction.

I joined the Gypsey Race as it left the village, winding it’s way through a wide sloping field. I could clearly see chalk deposits fringing the calm gentle flow of it’s early course. Ducks had gathered on it’s banks and as the lane took me to a bridge further on I could see the pure clarity of the water. The road carried on along the north side with the valley widening and the stream meandering away down through quiet pastures. I began to eliminate from my mind the telegraph poles, hedgerows and trees, to imagine this glistening stream in Neolithic times. For thousands of years It had been both the giver of life and the subject of ritual. At the quaint village of Kirby Grindalythe I was able to join it as it skirted the front of cottages and emerged out into open grassland again. I stopped a few times to listen to the gentle babble and to take in the clarity of the water flowing over the chalk bed. The path took me up the hill and around a farm and as the stream continued on it straightened out to follow the field boundary all the way to West Lutton. I dropped down to it at the point it seemed to be swallowed by houses but the stream had dried up leaving only a shallow ditch of long dried grass. The ditch squeezed in between two houses and then appeared to be better managed through the rest of the village as it passed by house frontages and St Mary’s church wall. From this point the Gypsey Race’s course had appeared to have been altered to fit beside the road as no more than a ditch which remained dry through the villages of East Lutton, Helperthorpe, Weaverthorpe and Butterwick. This was no surprise as knowing the Gypsey Race to be a winterbourne stream I knew it would reappear at some point ahead.

As I passed close by the village of Foxholes I saw that the ditch moved away from the road and doglegged south a few times. Then looking south from the road to the middle of a field I could see a spread of water and the faint trace of a ripple on it’s surface. Up ahead was the village of Wold Newton where I had booked a room on a farm for the night. I passed a series of ponds at the centre of the village and found that the stream had resurfaced and was flowing into one of them. The owner of my B&B owned the land the Gypsey Race passed through and told me of the unpredictable nature of the seasonal flooding caused by the stream which had given him and his father problems for his crops over the years. The general rule was that the stream was in full flow in late spring and then dried out during the summer months until late autumn.