Month: September 2023
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The Crags of White Hill: Evidence of a 1872 Landslip
A brisk autumn morning but with a subtle nip in the roriferous air, though the temperature would soon be rising. A warm day beckoned. Meanwhile, 377,000 kilometres away, the moon hangs in the morning sky, as is often the case during its waning gibbous phase, when it transitions from full to half. Down below on…
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Cheese, Stones, and a Summer Solstice Alignment
I’ve been diving back into that book, “Rock Art and Ritual,” the one I got off eBay a few weeks back. It’s been giving me the itch to go revisit some of the out of the way nooks and crannies on the North York Moors. So today, I took a little jaunt around Urra Moor,…
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The Cairn, the Schoolboy and the Vulpicide Outrage of 1903
A rickety cairn, perched precariously over Baysdale. I was told by a onetime resident of the dale that the cairn was built by Roland Close, an estate worker and archaeologist, who was brought up in Shepherd’s House, which can be seen in the distance. Close would walk this way to school in Kildale. A curious report…
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On this day in 1804: Jane Ewbank’s Journey to Whitby
Hardly a week goes by without news of some historical document being digitised. Recently, a diary of a lady named Jane Ewbank who lived in York during the time of the Napoleonic Wars has been published. Jane was born in 1778, and her father, George Ewbank, was a well-known druggist and banker in York. He…