Out & About …

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

Category: Lonsdale

  • Smelly Farm and the 18th Century Enclosures

    Smelly Farm and the 18th Century Enclosures

    A rather drab photograph capturing a drab-looking collection of barns, reflecting an exceptionally drab overcast day. The presence of a strong wind and rain in the air adds to the overall drabness. Lounsdale — sometimes spelt Lonsdale — stands before me in all its aromatic glory. The barns, once known to my friendship group with…

  • Clear felling on Little Ayton Moor has opened up super views across Great Ayton Moor all the way to Highcliff Nab

    Clear felling on Little Ayton Moor has opened up super views across Great Ayton Moor all the way to Highcliff Nab

    A light overnight snowfall hides the debris from the forestry work. I guess the remainder of the forestry will go in due course. Great Ayton Moor has a wealth of archaeological features which I’ve posted about many times before. A chambered cairn, a cairnfield , an Iron Age enclosure, and numerous tumuli. Elgee thought that…

  • Lower Lonsdale with Kildale beyond

    Lower Lonsdale with Kildale beyond

    Before the Norman Conquest Kildale was held by Orme, a thane of the king, who also seems to have been associated with Ormesby. When the church was rebuilt in 1868, several Scandinavian skeletons were discovered along with old swords, daggers. etc., all dating from the 9th-century. Perhaps one of these was Killi, from whom Kildale…

  • Ladder traps

    Ladder traps

    I spotted this trap the other day, deep down in the northern horn of Lonsdale. So a battle through the bracken to take a closer look. It’s what is known as a ‘ladder trap’ and consists of a timber-frame covered in chicken-wire mesh with a ‘V’ shaped roof leading to a narrow opening so that…

  • A lost path of Golstandale

    A lost path of Golstandale

    Alec E. F. Wright (1900 – 1981) was a local artist whose formative years were between the wars. His work is described as surrealist; some can be browsed here. I hadn’t realised it but Wright drew the maps for Bill Cowley’s book of the Lyke Wake Walk, a copy of which I have had on…

  • Samuel Liddle 1919-1944

    Samuel Liddle 1919-1944

    A few weeks ago I wrote about 16-year-old Mary Liddle who, in 1930, was awarded the R.S.P.C.A.’s Gold Medal for her bravery in helping to rescue a sheep from a disused stone mine. Adam and Elizabeth Liddle with their family of eight children were living at Lonsdale House Farm (now called Oak Tree Farm). That’s…

  • Lonsdale

    Lonsdale

    My memory is like a sieve. Only the day before yesterday, someone asked me when I had heard my first cuckoo this year. It was less than a week ago, yet I had to look it up on these posts. A bell rang somewhere but the details had gone. Even so I can remember exactly…

  • Hock-Monday

    Hock-Monday

    Today, the Monday after Easter is Hocktide, (or more specifically the Monday and Tuesday after Easter), and was a traditional medieval festival where games and sports took place, or there would be ‘hocking‘. This was a custom where the women would capture men and only release them on payment of a ransom, which went to…

  • Lonsdale

    Lonsdale

    Sylvia Plath tragically ended her life on this day in 1963. She was a 30 year old American poet, coping on her own in a house in London with two tiny children by the future Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes who had left her the previous year.  She’d had some success as a poet, the Observer…

  • A review of the year with 20/20 vision (Cont’d)

    A review of the year with 20/20 vision (Cont’d)

    The story so far … The government delayed lockdown and then opened too early, then kids were forced back to school, resulting in the greatest number of deaths in Western Europe. And then there was the A-level fiasco. Dominic Cummings broke the rules, as did Boris’s dad, and several MPs. The government spent millions on dodgy PPE…