Out & About …

… on the North York Moors, or wherever I happen to be.

Category: Guisbrough

  • Sir Michael Tippett

    Sir Michael Tippett

    Today, Sir Michael Tippett, perhaps the leading British composer of the 20th-century, would have been 114 years old. He is most famous for his oratorio ‘A Child of Our Time’, which was inspired by the murder in Paris of a German diplomat in 1938 by a Jewish refugee teenager. The murder led to the attacks…

  • Blue Lake

    Blue Lake

    Not really a lake and definitely not blue, more of a mucky brown. It is, of course, a small dam and the blue refers to the blue colour it was said to be because of the salts of alum that leached into the water. It was built in 1880 by Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease to…

  • Witch’s Brooms

    Witch’s Brooms

    Harry Potter had a Nimbus 2000 but what Hutton Lowcross lacks in quality, it makes up for in quantity of Witch’s Brooms. This mature birch tree in Bousdale Wood has an abundance of them. Not broomsticks of course but galls, deformities caused from an invasion by another organism. This might be a fungus, insect, virus…

  • Slapewath Viaduct

    Slapewath Viaduct

    It is not very often that this view is so clear. During the summer months, when the tree canopy and undergrowth is thick, the viaduct is almost hidden from the A171. Even today I have only managed to get six out of its eight arches in. The viaduct carried the Cleveland Railway, which was built…