Category: North York Moors
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The Fairy Stones
The road east out of Hutton-le-Hole towards Lastingham crosses a bridge over Fairy Call Beck. Just north of the bridge are the Fairy Stones, a mosaic of stepping stones naturally formed from the Cornbrash bedrock. The Cornbrash Formation is a narrow Jurassic layer of rock, composed part limestone and part sandstone, that is rich in…
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Bracken bashing on Roseberry Common
A wet return to volunteering for the National Trust after the Coronavirus lockdown. A nice simple task to ease the rusty joints: bracken bashing, which also has the benefit of enforcing social distancing. The common was sprayed last year with a bracken specific herbicide so today was just keeping on top on any persistent fronds.…
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Site of an aerodrome
If you look on the O.S. 1:25,000 map of Carlton Moor you will see a large area of ‘white’ moor, land that is not designated as Access Land under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000). Unfortunately, you can not get to this scale using my normal embedded map but here is a link…
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Hannah Coling Memorial
Over on the moors south of Scaling Dam Reservoir and I happened across this memorial to a woman who had died on the moor in 1848. H. COLING Perished here January 21st 27th 1848 I had heard there was a memorial somewhere on this moor but I wasn’t looking for it specifically. I found one…
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Masks
Sunshine, blue skies, a lovely morning to be out on the moors. No fear of losing your way in the fog today. No fear of being maskered. To ‘masker’ is a Yorkshire term meaning to render giddy, senseless, or bewildered as when lost in a blizzard, fog, or darkness. Masks are due to become very…
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‘A Wild Year’
Did you watch ‘A Wild Year‘ on BBC2 on Friday evening, featuring the North York Moors? It’ll be available on iPlayer for a while. I was left feeling disappointed. The filming was superb of course, slow motion and time lapsed, the usual BBC quality, but when it came to the inevitable section on grouse management,…
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The Matthew Paris map
How do you like your maps? Do you treat them with reverence, still in their pristine covers and neatly filed numerically? Or are they coverless, coming apart at the seams through years of use and being folded in origami shapes to cram into a map case? The thing we all probably have in common is…
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St. Swithin’s Day
A damp run on the moors this morning. Light rain, hardly wetting the paving slabs on Coate Moor. Would it though, be enough to satisfy St. Swithin, who according to the legend, if it rained today (15th July), it will be the start of forty days of rain. He was bishop of Winchester Cathedral and…
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Port Mulgrave
Every time I go to Port Mulgrave, it still feels very much the same, yet much has changed. The winter storms have eroded the old jetty. The harbour has become more silted, the fishermen’s huts more elaborate. Some now are clearly contenders for Grand Designs. Landslips have caused the steep paths down the cliff to…
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Armouth Wath
The North York Moors is not renown for its coalfields, but in the late 18th-century, coal was being mined here but on a much smaller scale than the deeper coalfields in other parts of the country. ‘Moor Coal’ seams are thin, usually between 15 and 55 cm. thick and generally occur in three bands, the…