3.53mi Harden Moor Circular Walk

Dec 18, 2023

3 min read

Updated: Oct 23

Harden Moor rises above Harden village near Bingley, West Yorkshire. Our 3.53-mile circular walk has its original GPS route on the Komoot map directly beneath the linked title. That is the route to follow, rather than a newly invented set of directions. What makes this moor especially interesting is how much older its recorded history is than the present village below.

Walk at a Glance

Distance: 3.53 miles, as recorded on the original Komoot tour.

Route: Circular walk in the Harden Moor area near Bingley, Bradford district, West Yorkshire.

Start and finish: Both recorded on the original Komoot map above.

Landscape: Open moorland and upland ground overlooking the Harden and Aire valleys. The GPS line establishes the route, not the location of every historical feature mentioned below.

Harden Moor Before Recorded History

People were living and burying their dead around Harden long before the medieval village existed. Harden Village Council records two extensive groups of Bronze Age burial mounds on the moor. Excavations produced decorated cremation urns, dated by the council to roughly 1400–1000 BC, which entered the collections of Cliffe Castle Museum.

Historic England protects several individual cairns on Harden Moor as Scheduled Monuments. One record, for a cairn north of Woodhead, explains that round cairns were built over Bronze Age burials and could contain stone-lined compartments. Such sites are important archaeological evidence, rather than just heaps of stones.

The wider archaeological landscape also includes traces of old routes. The village council records two Roman roads crossing Harden, one passing the beck near the Malt Shovel, then climbing beyond Harden Hall towards the moor. The later village grew in a place where people had already been moving across the hills for centuries.

The Village of Harden

Harden is mentioned in the Domesday survey of 1086 as Hateltone or Hatel-tun. The village council's historical account identifies three older hamlets, including a settlement by the beck, the farming community around what became the St Ives estate and another around Ryecroft.

During the medieval period, land in Harden passed to Rievaulx Abbey. Grants from the Birkin family placed parts of the landscape in monastic hands, and surviving records describe both farming and ironworking. The village council notes evidence of medieval iron smelting around the Harden Hall area.

Harden continued to develop during the nineteenth century. Bradford Council's Harden Design Code dates the Wesleyan chapel to 1813, the Congregational chapel to 1865 and the parish church to 1892. These later buildings belong to the history of the village, not to an assumed list of stops on our recorded moorland circuit.

The Nearby St Ives Estate

East of the moor lies St Ives Estate, a historic designed landscape between Harden and Bingley. It has a different character from the open moor: old woodland, formal planting, parkland and buildings associated with the Ferrand family. Historic England lists the estate as a Grade II registered park and garden.

The Ferrand family acquired Harden Grange in the seventeenth century, and its landscape was reshaped during the nineteenth century. Historic England describes the incorporation of rocky outcrops, woodland, moorland and older historical features into a romantic estate landscape. The name St Ives was adopted for the enlarged estate in the nineteenth century.

Bradford District Parks describes St Ives as the district's largest country park, with woodland trails, a pond and other visitor facilities. This is useful context for anyone exploring Harden more widely, but St Ives is a separate place and is not being presented as an unverified feature of the 3.53-mile walk.

Ancient Mounds and Modern Conservation

The burial mounds on Harden Moor are nationally important because they help archaeologists understand how people used the high ground in prehistory. The visible landscape has changed through farming, quarrying, roads and later recreation, but protected remains still help connect the present moor with its earlier inhabitants.

Bradford Council's design code draws directly on that history, recording the Bronze Age cairns and the Roman routes as features that shaped Harden's identity. Its maps and conservation material provide useful background without suggesting that the White Shire GPS route visits every recorded site.

Explore More Yorkshire

For a different recorded route close to Harden, including Goit Stock Wood, see our 4.41mi Harden Circular Walk.

Read Harden Village Council's history, Bradford Council's Harden Design Code and Historic England's record of a Bronze Age cairn for the background to the moor. For a separate visit to the nearby historic park, see Bradford District Parks' St Ives page. You can explore West Yorkshire Walks or the complete Yorkshire Walks collection for other original GPS-recorded routes. The Komoot map at the top remains the navigation for this walk.