Last Sunday, the weather gods allowed a final memorable spectacle of blue skies over the North York Moors before the autumnal gloom. From the heights of Cold Moor, the view towards the Wainstones was as grand as ever, but my eye was drawn not to the distant crags, but to something rather more curious: that single dressed stone in the flagged footpath — bottom left of the photo.
If memory serves, the path here was upgraded in the early 1990s, the stones themselves probably airlifted in by helicopter from who knows where. Yet one of them stands apart. It is subtly bowed, convex, its surface marked with a rough, deliberate texture. The far edge is smoothly finished and curved, as though it were meant to be seen.
A little further along—twenty metres or so—another appears. Fainter, more worn, but bearing the same peculiar pattern.
So what are these stones? Mere footpath slabs with delusions of grandeur—or remnants of something older, repurposed and forgotten? If they could speak, one suspects their story might outshine the view itself.
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