Out & About …

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

  • Starfish Decoy Command Bunker

    Starfish Decoy Command Bunker

    A rather gloomy morning and a fall back on a recycled subject. I last posted about this Starfish Decoy Command Bunker almost three years ago to the day. It looked a nice day then. Adjacent to the Hutton to Kildale track along Percy Rigg, this WW2 relic was one of 237 similar decoys around the…

  • Victorian Graffiti

    Victorian Graffiti

    The first of the morning sun highlights some Victorian graffiti on Roseberry. I am somewhat ambivalent about graffiti. Modern stuff is without a doubt hideously scarring but anything aged just a little bit becomes intriguing. When Mr Brodie carved this Queen Victoria was celebrating 33 years on the throne, Gladstone was Prime Minister and his…

  • Little Fryup Dale

    Little Fryup Dale

    Thanks to Martyn, a slight diversion to investigate the site of Fryup Church. I must have cycled up this lane to the Yorkshire Cycle Hub dozens of times and I never knew there was once a church in this field opposite Stonebeck Gate Farm. But the evidence is there. The wall this side of the…

  • Sunrise on Cliff Rigg

    Sunrise on Cliff Rigg

    Two major achievements. First I dragged myself out of the house whilst still dark and secondly, I managed a hypnopompic run up Cliff Rigg, the first since my attempt at an Icarus imitation. They say the darkest hour is before dawn. That’s probably not true once your eyes have become accustomed. Dick Turpin and his…

  • Baysdale

    Baysdale

    I very much doubt that any of these ruined barns is the one that gave its name to the “cowshed valley”, remote and isolated. Once Baysdale was home to a population of fairies who washed their ‘fairy butter’ in a favourite spring and left overnight on gate posts and fences after apparently throwing blobs at…

  • Aysgarth High Falls

    Aysgarth High Falls

    The River Ure tumbling over Aysgarth Falls, perhaps Wensleydale’s most famous beauty spot. Tumbling swiftly, it could be said. The name, Ure, is toponymically very old, coming from the Celtic language ‘isura’ means swift-flowing. That’s the Celts, before the Danes, before the Anglo-Saxons, who put up with the Roman occupiers. The written records that survive…

  • Ounsbury toppin hill

    Ounsbury toppin hill

    So Christopher Saxton annotated the hill in his Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales which he published in 1579. Commissioned by Elizabeth I, it was the first definitive map of England and Wales with each county being engraved on a separate copper plate on a scale of 1″ to 3⅓ miles. Maps were…

  • Newton Wood

    Newton Wood

    Heavy overnight rain and winds have taken their toll on the autumnal colours, russets, browns and yellows. On the lower path in Newton Wood, a yellow carpet of fallen hazel leaves covers the woodland floor. With the onset of shorter days and cooler temperatures, complex chemical changes occur in the leaves. The concentration of sugar…

  • A misty Coate Moor

    A misty Coate Moor

    “Mist muged on þe mor malt on þe mountez Uch hille hade a hatte a myst hakel huge” Two lines in Middle English from the medieval poem of Arthurian chivalry “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. Translated it says: The moor was muggy with mist, and the snow melted on the mountains, and each hill…

  • Moor Edge Stone

    Moor Edge Stone

    Another dull morning with a sky of corrugated grey cloud clipping the top of Roseberry. So an old favorite, the Moor Edge Stone marking the boundary between the parishes of Newton-under-Roseberry and Pinchinthorpe. Rendered in black and white in an attempt to emphasize the heavily weathered inscription of “TKS 1815” standing for Thomas Kitchingham Staveley…

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