Author: Fhithich
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Lonsdale
My memory is like a sieve. Only the day before yesterday, someone asked me when I had heard my first cuckoo this year. It was less than a week ago, yet I had to look it up on these posts. A bell rang somewhere but the details had gone. Even so I can remember exactly…
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Mayday, Mayday, Mayday
And we’re into May. From the Latin ‘Maius’, the Italic goddess, daughter of Faunus and wife of Vulcan. Mayday was a traditional day in Yorkshire farming practices when agricultural tenancies were changed, “the spring crops being likewise sown by the outgoing tenant, and valued with the wheat“, and “stock are turned into pasture grounds ……
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Great Fryup Dale from above Raven Hill
Regular readers will have realised that my latest preoccupation is searching old newspaper archive for snippets of lost history. Great Fryup Dale seems to have been a very untroubled valley – free from murders or unfortunate accidents. But I did come across a report from the Daily Gazette For Middlesbrough, dated 9 June 1879, of…
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Bransdale Church
It was pretty dreich this morning as we crested Shaw Ridge and dropped into Bransdale. I can not remember the last time the church at the head of the dale could not be seen. It’s a lovely little church, which Pevsner says “must be c. 1800” yet according to the parish website it was built…
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Bilsdale
On me bike today. Passing through Bilsdale on the way to Hawnby I remembered this 18th-century song I came across the other day: The BILSDALE FARMER. THERE was an old Farmer in Bilsdale did dwell He had but one Daughter a beauty excell. And many caming a courting but all to her ruin. But still…
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A lichen covered Highcliff Nab
I’ve heard my first cuckoo of the year. Cuckoo – an echo of the bird’s call – an onomatopoeia. Words come and go. Some words are just made up – neologisms. Shakespeare was apt to make up words, so was John Milton. In 1667, Milton was blind and impoverished, and it was on this day…
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The Wainstones
I was heading down a proverbial rabbit hole this afternoon when I stumbled across this little snippet from the York Herald, 25 Aug. 1849: “Gipsy” Party. — On Thursday week, a company from Bilsdale assembled on Wainstone-nab, intending to hold a “Gipsy” party on its summit. Wainstone-nab is a hill which overlooks the village of…
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“Its’ t’biggest Mountain in oll Yorkshire”
Roseberry made an appearance in a play once, in a farce of two acts called ‘The Registry-Office’ by Stockton-on-Tees born Joseph Reed. It was staged at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in 1761 and received the attentions of the Lord Chamberlain’s office because of its profanity and double entendres. An 18th-century ‘Registry Office’ was…
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Furthering the Right to Roam
Today is the anniversary of the Mass Trespass of 1932, when four to five hundred ramblers climbed Kinder Scout in the Peak District in defiance of the restrictions on access at the time. Their aim was to establish a public right of access onto the moors that were privately owned for grouse shooting. The movement…
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‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’
What to post about today? It’s either feast or famine. Could I muse misty-eyed about the feast day of a venerated Roman soldier who was born in Turkey of Greek stock and who (probably) never set foot in England and (also probably) never slew a dragon. Or I could celebrate the birthday in 1564 of…