Caravans and motorhomes: the roads

Sutton Bank: caravans are prohibited

This is the one sentence on the page that matters most. Caravans are prohibited on Sutton Bank, the A170 climb onto the Hambleton escarpment. It is not advice and it is not a matter of judging your own outfit: caravans do not go up or down it.

The bank has a maximum gradient of 1 in 4, or 25%, with a hairpin bend, and it rises around 160 metres in under a mile. Vehicles that are permitted on it must keep in low gear travelling up and travelling down. Plan your route into the park on the assumption that this road is closed to you, and read our Sutton Bank guide for what is at the top once you have arrived by another road.

Rosedale Chimney Bank

Rosedale Chimney Bank is around 1 in 3, one of the steepest roads in England, and it has hairpins. It is not a route for a towed van, and a long, heavy motorhome is meeting exactly the same gradient and the same bends. Our Chimney Bank page has the figures in full.

Blakey Ridge and the A169

Blakey Ridge and the A169 moor road are the two this site has long named as roads to plan around with a caravan or a big van. That is the whole of what we say about them, and I would rather say too little here than invent a restriction that does not exist.

Where a long outfit cannot go

The old-town streets in Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay and Staithes are, in this site's own long-standing words, hopeless in anything long. The Park & Ride is the answer at Whitby: leave the outfit at the edge of town and ride in rather than trying to turn round among the yards and the harbour lanes.

Overnight parking

National Park and council car park terms prohibit overnight parking and sleeping in vehicles, and that has been tightened at the coastal and moorland honeypots, with signage and enforcement in the busiest spots. The detail is on our camping and caravanning guide, and it is not something this page expands on.

What does work

Touring parks with hardstanding and hook-up, Caravan and Motorhome Club or Camping and Caravanning Club certificated locations, and pubs and farms that take a van by arrangement, ringing ahead rather than turning up. For the detail on all of those, and for where each part of the park suits which kind of outfit, see camping and caravanning, or Dalby Forest camping if the forest is your target. For everything else, where to stay compares the bases.

Satnavs, and what I cannot tell you

Two honest gaps. I cannot tell you whether any particular satnav brand or setting routes a caravan around Sutton Bank, because I have not verified it, so set your own route by the roads named above rather than trusting the device. I also give no weight, height, width or length limits anywhere on this page, for the same reason: a wrong restriction here would send somebody down a road they could not get out of.

The same climbs in an older car

These same banks test an older car for quite different reasons, and that is covered properly on our classic car driving routes page, as the two-wheeled view is on our motorcycling guide.