Month: April 2019
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Great Ayton from Cliff Rigg
An early wander with the dog up Cliff Rigg. Fog creeping up from the Tees Valley, its duvet not quite reaching the village. In an hour’s time, there’ll be sufficient heat in the sun for it to dissipate. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Upper Farndale
Perhaps the most peaceful of the North York Moors dales. That is after the short daffodil season is over and even then this high up the dale is rarely visited. It could all have been so different if the Kingston upon Hull Corporation had had its way. It brought 2,000 hectares of upper Farndale in…
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Bluebells, Newton Wood
It’s that time of the year, the bluebells of Newton Wood. They seem a bit early, it was 10 May last year when I posted my photo. A dull morning with a touch of drizzle but clouds beginning to clear after lunch. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Wood Field, Great Ayton
In the early 17th-century, agriculture in Great Ayton followed the ancient open-field system where the cultivated land of the parish was divided into many long narrow furlongs and sub-divided again into strips. This was all manorial land and those villagers who were tenants or serfs farmed several dozen of these unfenced strips scattered throughout the…
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Huntcliff, Saltburn
A dramatic farewell for Cleveland Way walkers as they begin their descent into Saltburn and turn west inland. Huntcliff rises 110 metres above the North Sea. Ironstone and sandstone strata form the upper shear cliff with softer mudstones lower down, all laid down in the Jurassic geological time period. The cliffs are losing a constant…
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Shed skin of an adder
On Bridestones Moor near Dalby Forest. Find of the day a sloughed or shed skin of an adder, a process which snakes regularly need to do. Such a find would have once been of some value as it was believed that it had healing powers. Cast off snake skins were once used by labourers as…
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Mark’s-e’en watch
A warm, beautiful morning but very hazy, not conducive at all for distant landscape photographs. All the colours end up being washed out. It must be all this Sarahan sand. Tomorrow, April 25, is the feast day of St. Mark the Evangelist which makes today St Mark’s Eve when it was the custom to sit…
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Nether Silton
Some recent felling in Silton Wood on the western flanks of the Hambleton Hills has opened up this view from Crabtree Bank. Hunter’s Hill Farm and the pasture fields of Nether Silton, with Kepwick beyond. The last of the light before the sun sank too low and the remaining blue skies clouded over. Open Space…
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Cliff Rigg and Roseberry
A view from Ayton Bank. On the right, Roseberry Topping, “Cleveland’s Matterhorn”, a glacial outlier, the remains of a spur of the moors eroded away by the last ice advance from the north-west as the ice, hundreds of metres thick, met the bulk of the high moors. Cliff Rigg, on the left, has a slightly…
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Rivelindale
A Public Footpath is mapped between Percy Cross and Highcliffe Farm crossing the vast bog of Sleddale Slack or Rivelindale as referred to in old documents. It is a little used path but there has been some recent cutting of the heather at the Percy Cross end. Across the bog, however, no such luxury, a…