Month: February 2026
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The Art of Dry-Stone Walling
It is widely held that the valleys of Rosedale, Farndale, Bilsdale and here in Bransdale show not the faintest scratch of glacial meddling. While the ice sheets rampaged around Yorkshire like uninvited guests, the North York Moors sat apart, dry and stubborn, an island that refused to drown. Geologists cling to an old rule, which…
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February Fair-Maids
The signs are there for all to see. The frogs in the garden pond have woken, shaking off winter like old men rising from stiff chairs. Hazel catkins hang thick and yellow in the brief scraps of sunlight. A few brave daffodil buds test the air. The sun provides apricity, its setting creeps past five…
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Gribdale Gate and the Edge of the Ice
A view from Cliff Rigg looking across to Gribdale Gate and Easby Moor, where the monument to Captain James Cook stands like a stubborn finger pointing at the sky. It is a landscape that seems quiet until you realise how much has happened here while humanity was busy elsewhere. Gribdale Gate is a well known…
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A Holloway to Gribdale Gate
I have long been fascinated by this track and steep-sided gorge that leads to Gribdale Gate on the Lonsdale side. Its form suggests deliberate shaping, as though carved by generations travelling to and from Great Ayton Moor. The talus slope is composed of shaley mudstone, which weathers into a slick, unstable mass, more mud than…
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The Last Trace of Fryup Church
Stonebeck Gate Farm sits quietly in Little Fryup Dale, minding its own business, yet the real story lies in the wall that cuts across the foreground. On the right of the metal gate stands ordinary random-coursed dry-stone walling, the sort seen across these hills without a second glance. To the left, however, the tone changes.…
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When Infographics Burn Brighter Than Evidence
An image drifted across my feed this morning: a mugshot of a certain former prince. Briefly amusing, obviously fake, the work of some obliging AI dressed up as reality. Elsewhere, a Facebook post from the Moorland Association offered something far less harmless. A polished infographic declared, with confident certainty, that ‘The “Burn-to-Rewet” Method Cuts Methane…
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2001: A Foot and Mouth Odyssey
25 years ago, in 2001, the country fell into an eerie stillness. Across the countryside, the “smell of death” drifted from funeral pyres as millions of animals were burned, transforming green fields into a “gigantic charnel house”. What began as a livestock disease quickly became a national trauma, exposing how fragile and tightly bound our…
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Among the Tree Guards of Bransdale
In Bransdale today, work continued among the ranks of tree guards set out over recent winters. The task was to fell the self-seeded conifer saplings that have spread so thickly through this corner of Bloworth Wood. New woodland does not simply grow and look after itself; it demands steady, patient management. From the valley floor,…
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Tidkinhow Moor: A Puzzle Written in Fading Ink
The other day, while wandering the web as one does when sense has taken the afternoon off, I found a digitised photocopy of a 1982 legal decision about Tidkinhow Moor. The page is mottled with foxing, stained by time, and the typewriter ink has faded like an old promise. It looked interesting to say the…
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The Wild Boar of Westmorland
Imagine standing here eight centuries ago in this small tributary of Kentmere. The place feels still now, but once it was no quiet backwater. Here, a family’s fate hung by a thread, and the stakes were as high as the fells around you. At the heart of it stands Richard Gilpin, said to have killed…