Out & About …

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

Category: Great Ayton

  • Aireyholme Farm

    Aireyholme Farm

    Best known as where James Cook lived as a boy and where his father was employed as the farm foreman, although it is likely that the Cook family’s actual cottage was sited a little distance out of shot to the left at the foot of Cliff Rigg. The modern farm buildings in the photo date…

  • Dances with sheep

    Dances with sheep

    A flock of Aireyholme sheep complete a short set piece of contemporary dance. Very niche. A carefully choreographed outdoor performance that is a joyful exercise in shape, rhythm and sound. But back to reality, another cracking day. Should we be worried? On this day last year, we woke up to a good snowfall with a…

  • Excavation of James Cook Senior’s Cottage

    Excavation of James Cook Senior’s Cottage

    An archaeological dig is currently underway in Great Ayton. For those of you who are not familiar with the story, the cottage of James Cook, the father of the famous explorer, Captain James Cook, was sold in 1934, dismantled stone by stone and shipped to Australia where it was re-erected in the Fitzroy Gardens in…

  • Roseberry Ironstone Mine

    Roseberry Ironstone Mine

    It would have been bleak for the folk of Great Ayton on this day in 1921 when the 220 workers at the Roseberry Ironstone Mine received notice to cease work, at the end of which the mine would be idle. It would have been the talk of the village. The mine had reopened in 1906…

  • Cliff Rigg Quarry

    Cliff Rigg Quarry

    Former whinstone quarry that dominates the modest Cliff Ridge overlooking the village of Great Ayton. The whinstone seam is part of the Cleveland Dyke, a protrusion of very hard volcanic rock cutting through the surrounding soft sedimentary rocks. It was formed 58 million years ago from a volcano near the Isle of Mull and can…

  • Yuletide greetings

    Yuletide greetings

    Since June the days have been getting shorter, tomorrow they’ll start getting longer again. Yippee. Let’s celebrate the ancient pagan festival of the Winter Solstice, Yule. You won’t see any noticeable difference in the morning light for a while though, by some quirk of astronomy sunrise actually gets a minute or so later. To our…

  • When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of fashion

    When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of fashion

    So you can breathe a sigh of relief. Of course, you can find the yellow flowers of the thorny gorse shrub all year round thriving on poor acidic soils. It is an evergreen member of the pea family with small coconut-scented flowers which are edible and used in salads. They make a nice cup of…

  • Nuthatch

    Nuthatch

    You will probably hear this little bird before you see it. It’s very vocal, singing a variety of loud songs with lots of different whistle-sounding notes. It’s the nuthatch, nut jobber, nut cracker, nut pecker or wood cracker. All referring to its habit of lodging nuts in crevices in the bark of trees to crack…

  • Fly Agaric

    Fly Agaric

    A damp stroll this morning. Most toadstools I come across are usually past their sell-by date. Dirty, forlorn, and partially eaten by insects. This one seems pristine and the classic toadstool as drawn in children’s books; the Fly Agaric or Amanita muscaria, poisonous twice over. One poison is muscarine, causing nausea and vomiting eventually leading…

  • Great Ayton and the Kindertransport

    Great Ayton and the Kindertransport

    80 years ago today Jewish, Quaker and other Christian leaders met with Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, to appeal to him to offer help to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. This was just five days after Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, the anti-Jewish riots in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia when synagogues, shops and…