Category: Easby Moor
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Inversion Intricacy — The Cleveland Hills from Easby Moor
We left the village this morning, enveloped in a thick fog, anticipating its prompt dispersal under the forecasted sunshine. Soon, intermittent patches of blue sky overhead began to play a fickle game. Only as we finally ascended through the murky haze to Easby Moor at 324 metres asl., we found ourselves above the clouds, affording…
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Remembrance Sunday on Easby Moor
On Remembrance Sunday, a brisk stomp picking up the memorial on Easby Moor for the solemn service by the Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team has become an unspoken tradition. A simple plaque there pays tribute to the unfortunate crew aboard a Hudson airplane, their three lives ending on a bitter February morning in 1940. They had…
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Smouts and Smeuses — A Cleveland Lexicon
Odd features of the landscape have always captivated my interest, though more often than not they tend to slip my mind upon returning home, overshadowed by more pressing matters. One of these curiosities is this kink in the dry-stone wall below Easby Moor. It’s almost as if two builders constructing the wall from opposite ends…
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With a teachers’ strike likely, it seems timely to point out that exactly 50 years ago today teachers resumed their normal working after a three-month work-to-rule dispute with the local authority
On this day in 1973, the Daily Mirror published interviews with some Teesside pupils: HILARY COX, age 13: “It’s rotten, it’s boring, and my Mam says she’s sick of me going in and out like a yo-yo all day. There’s nothing to do at all. “I’ve been going to all the classes that have been…
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The story of Cleopatra’s Needle’s journey to Britain
The well-known monument to Capt. James Cook was erected in 1827. The design of an obelisk has led some to speculate a masonic connection. But the more probable reasoning was that obelisks were simply in vogue. In that year, Dublin had begun its erection of the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park to commemorate victories by…
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A day of strange atmospherics
On this day in 2005, at 0601 in the morning, a huge explosion rocked an oil depot in Buncefield near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was the largest in peacetime Europe and the noise is said to have been heard as far away as the Netherlands. I seem to remember people at work saying they…
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A brilliant day on Easby Moor for the Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team’s Remembrance Sunday gathering
The gathering took place at the memorial to the aircrew who died when their Lockheed Hudson aircraft crashed into the hill on 11th February 1940. The aircraft took off from Thornaby-on-Tees at 04:10 and failed to gain suffient height due to ice forming on the wings. It clipped the escarpment, ploughing on through a drystone…
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Ward Nab, Kildale
I’m actually quite glad the Jubilee is over even though it’s likely to be the last one we’ll have for a while. Public outpouring of sentiment is not my scene. The Last Jubilee. I guess I’m a reluctant monarchist, but I really don’t care. Neither do I care for Republicanism. What is the alternative? Whether…
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It can be done …
The relatively small patch of heather moorland around Captain Cook’s Monument has recently been strip mowed. This photo is technically of a strip on Little Ayton Moor, north of the parish boundary wall, but the area surrounding the monument, Easby Moor, also has at least two parallel strips. The moors are technically dry upland heath,…
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CSRT Remembrance Commemoration
The Cleveland Search and Rescue Team held their Remembrance Commemoration at the memorial plaque to the airmen who were killed in the Lockheed Hudson aircraft crash in 1940. See here and here for more details. It has been recommended to me that I read Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Gardener’ on this day. It’s a…