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Jack’s Short Life: From Rural Bilsdale to the Trenches of the Great War
A view from Cold Moor to Garfit Gap. The row of sheds belong to the industrial pheasant rearing farm at Whingroves, a shining example of rural diversification, if one defines success as raising battery-bred birds for folk to shoot. In 1896, however, it was just another typical mixed farm on the North York Moors, run…
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A Dog’s Grim Discovery: A Moorsholm Murder
It began, as many grim tales do, with a dog. One cold March morning in 1857, Joseph Green, a farmer in the quiet village of Moorsholm—tucked between Guisborough and Whitby—was startled when his dog returned home with a gruesome prize clamped in its jaws: the leg and foot of a child. The horror of the…
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Mother Shimble’s Snick-needles
The famous Bluebells of Newton and Cliff Rigg Woods are having a lie-in. Give them a week, perhaps, before they are at their best. Meanwhile, the true prima donna of the woodland floor is the Greater Stitchwort, cluttering the place with its endless sprinkling of white, star-shaped flowers that seem to think themselves terribly precious.…
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Sir George the Dragon Slayer
A picturesque bank of cloud hung over the Cleveland Hills this St. George’s Day morning. A reminder that even the sky can be more subtle than patriotic flag-wavers. St. George’s Day stirs about as much feeling in me as Carlin Sunday, Plough Monday or Hocktide – curious relics of a myth-soaked past, clung to by…
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Gribdale — Gorse, Ghosts, and Geology
A view looking down onto Gribdale Terrace — a neat row of white cottages built for the quarrymen who toiled in the nearby whinstone mine and quarries. Picturesque, if one forgets what they were built for. And where exactly is Gribdale, you ask? A good question, though clearly one nobody has bothered to answer properly.…
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Living Heritage: From Cask Beer to Bloodsports
A short, uneventful stroll along the Public Rights of Way encircling Harewood House today, which remained tastefully out of sight for most of the way—probably for the best. I shall reserve for another time any reference to the minor detail that Harewood House owes its existence largely to money wrung from slavery and sugar plantations…
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Hunt Cliff — Victorian Engineering Meets Geological Indifference
It is endlessly surprising—though it really should not be—how absurdly fragile this stretch of the old Cleveland Railway remains, teetering along the edge of Hunt Cliff as though daring gravity to intervene. Originally built between 1865 and 1867, its grand purpose was to move ironstone from Loftus to the blast furnaces east of Middlesbrough. Rather…
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Tripsdale: Following Sheep into the Abyss
“What shall we do tomorrow?” asked my wife, as if I had a list of thrilling options tucked up my sleeve. I suggested Tripsdale and the Ship Stone—also known, with thrilling regional charm, as “T’ Ship Steean.” I then asked if she had ever visited the Low Cable Stones. She had not. Not unsurprising. Getting…
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On this Day in 1936, the Iconic Trig Pillar was Born
On 18 April 1936, a small band of surveyors gathered around a concrete pillar in a field in Cold Ashby, Northamptonshire, to begin the retriangulation of Great Britain. The previous effort, from the early 1800s, had apparently become too out-dated to be useful. Thus began the era of the trig pillar: those four-foot concrete obelisks…
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A Bransdale Stang Stoop That Time has Forgot
Up on Gimmer Bank in Bransdale today, just above Bloworth Slack before it merges with Badger Gill to become Hodge Beck, I noticed this old piece of farming history: a ‘stang stoop’, or ‘heave’, or ‘slip gate’—back from when labour was cheap and farmers made do with local resources instead of buying five-bar gates from…
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