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Life Support for a “Green and Pleasant Land”
A gloomy photograph for a gloomy day in a gloomy month. The sky is doing that flat grey thing, the sort that drains the colour out of everything. As if on schedule, the news has joined in, with fresh misery arriving from across the Atlantic, where the headlines manage to sink the mood even further.…
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Sutton Bank’s Finest Object Today
The “finest view in England” decided to play hard to get on our trudge from Sutton Bank, and anything else worth photographing was equally uncooperative. So this posting is very much for the faithful. Those nerds who slow down for roadside trivia and feel a small thrill at a lump of iron with numbers on…
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Initials in Stone, Mist in Motion
I stood on the summit of Roseberry Topping this morning, watching the mist drift over the fields below like a slow tide. The place felt as old as the hills, quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. Looking down at graffiti cut into the rock centuries ago only sharpened that feeling. I am guessing, of…
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Filling the Gaps on a Bransdale Hillside
A return to Bransdale, where last winter the National Trust planted 6,000 saplings onto the steep side of Bloworth Slack. The site had been clear-felled, a blank but messy page waiting for a better story than rows of timber grown for profit. To give the youngsters a fighting chance, the usual tree guards went in.…
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The Impossible Rescue—a Victorian Lifesaving Legend
A fine day today on the coast south of Robin Hood’s Bay, the sort that invites postcards and ice creams, albeit a little chilly. In January 1881 it was another matter. A storm was brewing, snow lay in eight-foot drifts on the high ground, and the village was all but cut off from the world.…
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A Path Marked Clearly, Only it Points Left
About twenty minutes today went on scrubbing the graffiti off the rock faces, as I posted yesterday. Fortunately, it was water-based. They are not perfect, their shadow still lingers if you squint. Still, it is a sight better than the mess that was there before. Progress, slow and steady, like pushing treacle uphill. On the…
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Beyond Apathy — Learning to Care Again
Appreciation of nature arrives like sunrise through a dark forest. What was once the shadow of youth becomes colour. Grass, rock, heather all minding their own business, doing it well. For the moment the world makes sense and you do too. You are small, but not spare. You fit. That is enough. Then, darkness returns.…
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Faith, Frugality, and Education: Ayton School in the 1840s
A dreich Sunday morning left the village unusually quiet—an ideal moment to post a piece that has been waiting patiently on the back burner for the right photo. Old buildings are silent witnesses to history. Their stones and timbers absorb human lives, ambitions, and compromises, even when those stories fade from memory. If we know…
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Hiding the Snowbones
I woke to a fresh cover of snow and a wall of fog. One lifted the spirits, the other did its level best to flatten them. Ten minutes after leaving the house and starting the climb up Roseberry, the sky had a change of heart and slowly thinned to an azure blue. The temperature inversion…
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Shelter in Stone — Bee Boles in Glaisdale
It is eleven years since I last walked this stretch of Glaisdale, and it is a quiet pleasure to find the bee boles still standing, having endured the long attrition of moorland winters. Even the ungainly stock fencing has earned its keep, discouraging sheep from testing their climbing skills. Bee boles are recesses built into…
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