Category: Easby Moor
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From a Scenic View to Deadly Plots: The Cato Street Conspiracy
On the parish boundary between Easby and Kildale, looking through the self-seeded birch wood toward Ward Nab, a sandstone outcrop the origin of which name escapes my grasp. Therefore, I must lean on hodiurnal past happenings for the rest of this post. In the tumultuous throes of economic strife and political unrest in the early…
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Easby Moor from Roseberry Topping
The names Easby and Roseberry both derive from Old Scandinavian, but what did the Deiri tribe, nestled snugly between the Humber and the Tees rivers, call these places? Picture Deira as the precursor to Yorkshire, holding court in York. But Deira wasn’t a territorial area. It seems more like a robust dynasty. The exact genesis…
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Yat stoops on Easby Bank
On a morning with ever-changing atmospheric conditions, I found myself in pursuit of that elusive sun. The weather played tricks, switching between drizzle and dullness one moment, and dazzling sunlight accompanied by rainbows the next. Thus, an opportunistic approach in selecting a photograph for today’s posting. This pair of ‘yat stoops‘ located on Easby Bank…
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Christmas Contemplations
On this eve of Christmas Day, I found myself deep in thought. It seems a mere five minutes since last year. Maybe it’s just because of that old chestnut: “time flies when you’re having fun.” Each morning I do wake up excited as to what adventures the day will bring. Dopamines, those pleasure-inducing chemicals, supposedly…
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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…