Out & About …

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

Category: Capt. Cook’s Monument

  • A few moments later it was snowing

    A few moments later it was snowing

    Well, it was white and it was falling from the sky. I’m not sure if the Inuit, with their fifty words for snow, would have one for the snow that fell over Capt. Cook’s Monument early this morning but the Scots do have a nice word flindrikin usually a light, flimsy garment but which was…

  • Capt. Cook’s Monument

    Capt. Cook’s Monument

    250 years ago Lieutenant James Cook was two and a half weeks into his first voyage on board the HMS Endeavour. He was bound for the Pacific Ocean where he was to record the transit of Venus across the Sun in order to devise a method of determining longitude. On September 12th he anchored at…

  • Capt. Cook’s Monument and Cockshaw Hill

    Capt. Cook’s Monument and Cockshaw Hill

    Late evening view of Captain Cook’s Monument, in this 250th year since Cook set out on his first voyage. Beneath the monument the commercial plantation of Little Ayton Moor, and below that, Cockshaw Hil,l with its disused sandstone quarry. Across the lush green fields, the line of the whinstone intrusion of the Cleveland Dyke can…

  • Easby Moor

    Easby Moor

    Easby Moor and Captain Cook’s Monument viewed from Aireyholme lane. Ayton Banks Farm is in the foreground. The crags on the left are the disused sandstone quarry on Cockshaw Hill. Open Space Web-Map builder Code

  • Grýlukerti

    Grýlukerti

    An exploration of the rocks of Cook’s Crags on Easby Moor. And lots of icicles in the overhangs. The Icelandic word for icicle is grýlukerti which literally translates as Grýla’s candle. Grýla was an ogress who lived a cave in the mountains with her thirteen boys. At Christmas, she would come down to the villages…

  • Capt. Cook’s Monument on Easby Moor

    Capt. Cook’s Monument on Easby Moor

    The dry stone wall might appear ruined but it is still a significant boundary. It is the boundary between the parishes of Kildale and Easby (Stokesley). It separates Easby Moor and Coate Moor (or Court Moor to use its 19th-century name). And it marks the edge of the Open Access Land although there has always…

  • Lonsdale Slack

    Lonsdale Slack

    Friluftsliv, a Norwegian philosophy embracing spending time connecting with nature, literally translates as “free air life”. Just being outdoors in the forests and mountains. Even the dense uninspiring commercial forestry plantation on Coate Moor can seem magical given the right lighting. Like this morning, a few minutes after sunrise. Open Space Web-Map builder Code

  • Easby Moor from Roseberry

    Easby Moor from Roseberry

    My turn to take the dog out this morning so out early from a damp and misty Great Ayton, the sea fret of yesterday still persisting. Climbing Roseberry the sun began to appear until a cloudless blue sky at the summit with the Cleveland plain hidden below. This is a view to Capt. Cook’s Monument on Easby Moor.

  • Great Ayton Moor

    Great Ayton Moor

    There’s an old adage that is said in all farming communities, from Scotland, to Wales and to Cumbria: Where there’s bracken there’s gold; where there’s gorse there’s silver; where there’s heather there’s poverty At first it’s hard to see the reasoning. Bracken is allelopathic, it produces toxins in the soil which prevents other plants from germinating. Hardly…

  • Capt.Cook's Monument

    Capt.Cook's Monument

    I recently read an article which suggests a Masonic connection to the obelisk and with the great man himself. Apparently obelisks symbolize the Egyptian sun god Amon Re and its cap  or ‘benben’ is actually a pyramid. Now a pyramid forms the basis of the Freemasonry symbol The Eye of Providence, a symbol which can be seen on the reverse of the Great…