Out & About …

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

Young Ralph Cross

I thought I had seen the last of the snow on the North York Moors. It is, after all, April! The Young Ralph Cross is perhaps the best-known wayside cross in the National Park, it appears on their logo. Supposedly erected by as a guidepost by the nuns of Rosedale Priory in the 13th-century after Margery, the prioress of Baysdale Priory, became lost on the moors. Ralph was a layman who was guiding Elizabeth, the prioress of Rosedale Priory to meet Margery and who found Margery in the mist. But most of what you see dates from much later, perhaps, 18th-century, with a few modern steel pins thrown in when the cross was twice broken in the 80s and 90s. The cross also marks the northeastern tip of the Wapentake of Pickering Lythe which is mentioned in the Domesday Book. (A wapentake is an administrative subdivision of a county, used particularly in the North.) So did the Cistercians nuns of Rosedale erect their cross where Margery was found or to mark the limit of the land granted to them.


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