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. There is something called Gribdale Gate, a notch in the escarpment — dramatic name for a gap — but no actual dale to speak of. No valley. No romantic stream babbling down it. A trickle of a stream below the Terrace does flow down a re-entrant of sorts, but calling that a ‘dale’ is generous, bordering on fiction.
There is, however, a ridge. A spur. A rise in the land where the road goes, formerly known, rather charmingly, as ‘Howl Road’. Because of course it is. Local superstition insists that if you stand at Gribdale Gate on New Year’s Eve at midnight, you will see an old man appear and then disappear. Naturally. What else would one expect in this part of the world?
The ridge, such as it is, owes its existence to the Cleveland Dyke — or whinstone, for those fond of local terminology. In the photo, the course of this igneous intrusion can be made out running from Cliff Rigg in the distance and continuing along the road behind the cottages, conveniently marked out by stubborn gorse bushes that thrive on the rock’s peculiar soil. ‘Whin’ is, unsurprisingly, an old dialect word for gorse.
Some of the whinstone here was actually mined — not content with quarrying the surface, they burrowed under the road for more. The Dyke itself was born from some long-forgotten volcanic event near the Isle of Mull, which tore open the earth in a fit of lava-based fury, creating a fissure up to 28 metres wide down which the lava flowed. The result, a vertical wall of whinstone, now threads through Scotland, Cumbria, Durham, across the Tees, through the North York Moors and under the sea, where it eventually peters out.
Wherever this Dyke breaks the surface, people have been unable to resist the urge to extract it. Whinstone’s legendary hardness and reluctance to turn into dust made it ideal for Victorian ambitions: street cobbles for Yarm, Stockton, Whitby, and other towns which thought themselves important enough to deserve them. During the 19th century, the quarrying frenzy escalated until even Leeds decided it wanted a piece, buying up Cliff Rigg quarry in the 1890s to furnish its streets with suitably indestructible paving.
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