Month: December 2025
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Roseberry Watching Over Enclosed Land
The nearest field in today’s photograph marks the site of the old farmstead of Summerhill, born out of Great Ayton’s enclosure of the common land in 1658. At that time, the commons stretched all the way to the top of Roseberry, open and shared in a way that would soon vanish. The enclosure was carried…
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Commondale and the Forgotten Potters of the Home Front
Commondale is a quiet village now, the sort that seems still half asleep by mid-morning. It was not always like this. The arrival of the railway changed everything. A brickworks followed, then a pottery, turning out objects of real quality. When pottery declined, production shifted again. Sanitary ware was made in volume, along with facing…
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Chalybeate Dreams and Murky Realities
The orange colouring of this stream is a clear sign of iron salts in abundance. This is known as chalybeate or ferruginous water, a substance once held in high esteem in the 17th century when mineral waters were treated as a cure for most known ailments and several imaginary ones besides. People drank it with…
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The Lady Chapel
The precise beginnings of this agreeable little chapel tucked into the trees are lost to time, which is how such places like it. What we do know is that by 1397 a licence had been granted for Mass to be said here, neatly separating it from the later Mount Grace Priory, a Carthusian house nearby.…
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Lost Without Moving: Britain’s Wandering North
A cracking morning. This view looks north-east from Newton Moor, over Guisborough, out to the North Sea and whatever lies beyond it, behaving impeccably for once. “Grid to mag, add; mag to grid, get rid” is the sort of mnemonic that lodges in the brain for life, usually thanks to the Cubs and a damp…
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Solstice Greetings from Oakdale
Forty years ago, sending and receiving Christmas cards felt like a rite of passage, a quiet signal that one had stepped into adulthood and set up house. Some even embraced the annual letter, chronicling the family triumphs and tribulations for distant friends and relatives. We never warmed to the round-robin missive that trumpeted life’s successes,…
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Crimson Herald of the Coming Sun
This is a novelty for this long-suffering blog: a photograph taken from my very own doorstep, with sunrise still twenty minutes off and the sky already plotting its little drama. Most people know the old saying about the red sky and the fortunes of sailors, with its murky origins somewhere in scripture and the occasional…
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The “T” Stones of Bilsdale West Moor
The North York Moors are littered with boundary stones, each one usually stamped with a dutiful little initial, the sort of thing an aristocratic landowner might choose when feeling terribly important. An “M” for Manners, an “F” for Feversham, a “CD” for Charles Duncombe. All very neat, all very tidy. Then you stumble upon a…
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The Scar on the Hill: Cliff Rigg Quarry
A dreich veil hung over North Yorkshire this morning, so I look back instead to yesterday, when the sky was clear, the air still, and the sun at least toyed with the idea of shining. Cliff Rigg Quarry looms above Great Ayton, a cavernous rent in the hillside left behind by an industry that has…
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Glaisdale’s Brief Age of Iron
Glaisdale began life as a quiet township within the parish of Danby, its name shifting through the centuries as Glasedale and Glacedale. Records from 1223 already linked it with the broad sweep of Glaisdale Moor, giving a sense of a place long settled into its landscape. For much of its history it has been a…