Category: North York Moors
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Prehistoric cross dyke, Fylingdales Moor
Fylingdales Moor is a huge area of heather moorland owned by the Strickland Estate but managed by the Hawk and Owl Trust as a conservation area using “traditional moorland management techniques”. The moor contains many archaeological features. The largest is this prehistoric cross dyke, three parallel ditches with earthbanks between, 780m long. Often the uniformity…
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Stocking Crags Wood, Bransdale
A slow, misty drive over Rosedale Head. Past the Lion Inn, its solitary light pinpointing our position. Into lovely Stocking Crags Wood with its enrapturing colours and moss-covered boulders. Very autumnal. Cleaning up the bird boxes ready for next year’s tenants. Out with the old nest, just one tiny unhatched egg. And for the treecreepers…
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Chop Gate
Woe betides anyone who pronounces this village with a hard ‘g’, in the same way as your garden gate. As every Yorkshireman will tell you it’s Chop Yat which is a mix of etymological roots. The Yat is Old Norse for a road and Chop comes from the Old English ‘ceap‘ for an itinerant peddler.…
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A view from Turkey Nab across lower Kildale
Earlier this year, on January 29 a dead buzzard was found “on top of a dry-stone wall, next to a layby on the Kildale to Commondale road near Percy Rigg”. The RSPB and the police were informed and the bird was sent off for toxicology tests which came back in July saying the likely cause…
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East Rosedale old kilns
Lovely rich colours of the sandstone masonry of the old calcining kilns at East Rosedale, miraculously still standing after a century of abandonment. The inner linings of fire bricks look very precarious. An idea of the industrial scene in the 1920s can be seen in this old photo https://goo.gl/images/yALTvw although when it was taken the…
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Stebynthwayte
A wet stroll. A very wet stroll. First proper rain I’ve been caught out in for months. Headed over to Square Corner and into upper Ryedale. I had in mind to revisit a peculiar arrangement of standing stones at the old farmstead of High Cote. There are seven in this cluster including the prone one,…
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Cockayne
Bransdale is the home to 25 families of whom 9 make their living from farming. The largest community is Cockayne, at the head of the dale, but describing it as a hamlet might be overgenerous. A few houses and the simple church is there, dedicated to St. Nicholas. The datestone says 1886 but the architecual…
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Hawthorn hedgerow
And so into October, the eighth month of the old ten-month Roman calendar. Eventually, they cottoned on that having 60 days of winter “monthless” wasn’t such a good ideal so January and February were added and October became the tenth month. And one of the delights of October is that the countryside still retains some…
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Dale Head Bee Boles
Do other animals exhibit man’s craving for sweetness? I guess bears do, or at least Winnie the Pooh does. It is said that the refinement of sugar originated in the Indian subcontinent in prehistory. The Crusaders brought it back to Europe and but it wasn’t until the development of sugar plantations in the West Indies…
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Roseberry Sunset
Such a cracking sunset last night that I had another evening stroll. An online ephemeris tells me the sun will set at 269.4°, pretty close to due west. Not surprising when you think about it, just two days after the Autumn equinox. And it just so happens that Roseberry Topping is a smidgen off due…