Month: February 2026
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A Pithy Guide to the King Charles III Coast Path
At Marske Sands, a wooden fingerpost points towards Redcar and its turning turbines, as if pointing out the obvious. The King Charles III Coast Path belongs to a 2,700 mile plan to walk round the island, or near enough. It is the sort of stroll that rewards enthusiasm with blisters. You walk north until Scotland…
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Is “Managing” Nature the Right Thing to Do, or Just an Excuse?
It never fails to weary me how interest groups reach for academic work as a drunk reaches for a lamppost, more for support than illumination. A paper appears, and before the ink is dry it is trimmed, polished, and made to serve a house creed. We have seen the trick before, from vaccine doubters to…
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Inheritance and Oblivion on Urra Moor
On the bleak expanse of Urra Moor, a lone boundary stone stands sentinel over the heather. Winter has tried to lay its white shroud over the name FOULIS, once lord of the manor at Ingleby, but hasn’t quite succeded. It reads like a quiet obituary in stone, the record of a family slipping out of…
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From Parish Wall to Prime Minister
Despite the slush and the grey skies, snow lends even the most familiar ground a quiet grandeur. Roseberry Topping, half veiled in white, looks less like a hill and more like a stage set, its lines sharpened and its history briefly made visible. This wall climbing its eastern flank marks the old parish boundary between…
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The Track Through Hall Wood
Hall Wood in Farndale hides a solid, well-made track, the sort that suggests purpose and history. It is said to have led to a sawpit. If so, it kept its secret well today. I found the path, but not the pit. The wood was less forthcoming than the National Trust’s heritage records. Timber once mattered…
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Humps and Bumps: The Ghost of Parva Broctune
Scan this green pasture of Parva Broctune and you will spot the neat ‘S’ of Little Broughton Beck slicing through a quilt of humps and bumps. It looks gentle enough. It is not. Those undulations are the bones of a village. The land keeps its own ledger, and it does not forget. Wind the clock…
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Biodiversity Net Gain: Green Promises, Thin Results
The UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain scheme was meant to be our environmental shield. A simple promise that development would leave habitats “in a measurably better state than they were before.” It is sold as a key tool to halt “catastrophic declines in nature.” Fine words, neatly printed. The proposal to develop an 11.63ha site overlooking…
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Redcar: Where Time Was Scoured Clean
When Storm Chandra recently lashed the North East coast, it behaved like a blind cosmic spade, scraping away millions of tons of sand to uncover a bleak, barnacle-furred graveyard. This was no run-of-the-mill blow. It delivered a rare, once-in-a-decade “unsanding” that laid bare the black, broken teeth of a 6,000-year-old petrified forest, alongside the skeletal…
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Access Without Respect
A pack of a dozen mountain bikers bursts down the newly rebuilt, stone-stepped path on Roseberry Topping. Several are motor-assisted. Gravity does the rest. Gravel skitters, walkers flinch, gates are left yawning behind them. For a few loud seconds the hill is theirs, claimed by speed and noise. It looks impressive, in the way a…
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The Smallest Forest on the Stump
I have discovered an app on my phone that had been hiding in plain sight. The ‘Magnifier’. A small thing, yet it has opened a door. The everyday world has shrunk and turned strange. Tree stumps become miniature forests. Rough wood turns into a map of ridges and valleys. Peering at a pale green stand…