Month: December 2025
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Glaisdale and the Enigma of T. H.
Some two hundred yards up from the foot of the lane that strains its way up Caper Hill, a dry-stone wall is built around a large orthostat. Rough-hewn at the edges and smoothed across its face, it carries a message cut by hand in the late seventeenth century. Kneeling in the damp and wind, its…
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Scarth Nick and the Making of a Landscape
Scarth Nick, a dry trench bordered by steep banks of bracken and heather, stands as a striking reminder of the fierce sculpting of the great Ice Age. Around fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, a glacier from the north spread across the vale of Cleveland and pushed an icy tongue deep into Scugdale. As it…
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Before Satellites Spoilt the Fun: The Rise of Triangulation
Trig points cling to hilltops like relics from a time when humans trusted metal and masonry rather than shining toys orbiting the earth. This one on Roseberry’s summit keeps being repainted in traditional white, only to be graffited again by passing aritists who imagine posterity cares about their scribblings. With GPS now doing the clever…
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A Heart over The Ship Inn
Is that a heart floating above The Ship Inn at Old Saltburn. Charming. The pilot must have been struck by a fit of sentiment, or perhaps simply bored stiff. Back in the eighteenth century this tiny fishing village beneath Huntcliff and the ever-so-subtle Cat Nab managed to support four inns, plus enough gin shops to…
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Cloud Duvet over the Cleveland Hills
The morning sky was as clear as one could hope for December, though the Cleveland Hills had chosen to hide beneath a bank of cloud. One could call it an orographic cloud, if one wished to sound as if one had paid attention in geography lessons. The term comes from the Greek oros for mountain,…
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Barningham Moor
Barningham Moor lies high in the Northern Dales between the Swale and the Tees, a stretch of upland that most travellers notice only as a vague rise on the horizon while speeding along the A66. I have passed it for years without realising there was anything remarkable up there at all. From its upper slopes,…
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December Arrives and Haws for the Birds
And so we stumble into December, once the proud tenth month of a Roman calendar designed by people who thought it wise to leave sixty days of winter adrift like sheep in a snow drift. Eventually they realised this was a fool’s errand, tacked on January and February, and shuffled December to twelfth place. One…