Round Hill Memorial Shelter

Many of you will know I don’t agree with memorials. Benches, plaques and rock carvings littering the moors. But this one has been tucked away discretely off major paths overlooking Greenhow Botton for 46 years and I didn’t know it existed until very recently. I thought it was a shooting butt at first. A circular, low dry stone wall with a plaque saying it was erected in memory of a Mitchell Atkinson, a “lover of wild places” in 1972. It obviously suffers from a basic design flaw being full of drifting snow but a no mean feat to build. I just hope the stones weren’t robbed from the nearby pre-historic burial mound of Round Hill, the highest point on the North York Moors.