Category: Highcliff Nab
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Codhill Farm and Bold Venture
It’s not the most obvious place to site a farm, on the col between Highcliff Nab and Great Ayton Moor. A col unsheltered from both northerly and southerly winds. The col was formed as a spillway to the south from lakes formed between the north-facing escarpment of the Cleveland Hills and the glacier flowing along…
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The day Guisborough led the nation
A view of Highcliff Nab across Bold Venture Gill. This boundary stone is one of a line of marking the former boundary of Guisborough and Hutton Lowcross boundary. It is inscribed ‘T.C. G. 1860’; standing for Thomas Chaloner and Guisborough. But it is his father, Robert Chaloner, I want to write about today. I have…
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Mesolithic Guisborough
I often stand on a viewpoint and wonder what the landscape before me was like in times past. What did our ancestors, standing on this same spot see? More often, my imagination struggles to extend beyond the past century. A millennium past and it becomes hazy and obscure. Eight millennia, I can only reach in…
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A lichen covered Highcliff Nab
I’ve heard my first cuckoo of the year. Cuckoo – an echo of the bird’s call – an onomatopoeia. Words come and go. Some words are just made up – neologisms. Shakespeare was apt to make up words, so was John Milton. In 1667, Milton was blind and impoverished, and it was on this day…
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Potters Ridge
I have not taken a photo from this spot before. Honest. I moved a hundred metres south from Black Nab to be sure. I have often wondered how Potters Ridge got its name. That low 25 metre high prominence behind Highcliff Nab. I think I’ve found out. In 1806, Robert Chaloner, the Lord of the…
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Rivelingdale from Potters Ridge
The image belies the buffeting I was getting by the bitter wind. I was on Potters Ridge, a small 24m high prominence of Guisborough Moor. Highcliff Nab is at the north-western end, and views of Sleddale and Rivelingdale on the southern, the ridge bisected by the forestry boundary fence. I am currently reading ‘Sapiens’ by…
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And so, into February – mud, cabbage, cakes, and streaking
February, or as the Venerable Bede wrote ‘Solmonaþ‘ – Mud Month. (The ‘þ‘ is a thorn, a character used in Old English and pronounced similar to ‘th’ apparently. It is also used in modern Icelandic.) The view today is of Highcliff Nab taken from just below Black Nab across the fields of Codhill or Highcliffe…
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“It’s back to square one”
So headlined the Daily Mail this morning. Or as I heard on the radio; I didn’t actually read the paper. But it got me thinking where does that phrase come from. So I reached for my copy of the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the 1993 edition when the World Wide Web was still…
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It’s looking a bit black over Bill’s mother’s
An East Midlands expression that came back to me on Potter’s Ridge, a small hill that has Highcliffe Nab on its northwestern end. A few moments later the first drops of rain arrived. And don’t ask who Bill was, ’cause I never found out. On strange phrases, I learnt a new word today – ‘quockerwodger’…
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Highcliff Nab
“Overhanging the romantic and picturesque vale of Gisborough, a bold prominent rock rears its reverend head, hoary with mosses and lichens, and rent into vast chasms by the storms and tempests of centuries. It is skirted to the north with rich plantations of fir and venerable forests of oak; towards the south it is surrounded…