Out & About …

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

Category: Gribdale

  • Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus

    Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus

    Well, Spring has sprung, it’s pancake day, and of course it’s St. David’s day, so ‘Dydd Gŵyl Dewi hapus‘ to all you Welsh speakers. As one proverb says ‘March (has) many weathers‘ so it’s not surprising that there are many proverbs foretelling the weather. If we have a wet month, we might say: A wet…

  • The Cleveland Dyke

    The Cleveland Dyke

    I ‘discovered’ this viewpoint the other day. It nicely illustrates the route of that intrusion of igneous rock known as Cleveland Dyke. The Cleveland Dyke was formed about 59 million years ago when an immense hot spot of pressurised molten magma developed under the Earth’s crust near the island of Mull off the west coast…

  • Gribdale

    Gribdale

    I’ve never really figured out where Gribdale begins and where it ends. There is no dale as such.  The col between Capt. Cook’s Monument and Great Ayton Moor is known as Gribdale Gate. Beyond that, we’re into Lonsdale, so Gribdale must lie this side. But there is no valley. A stream does spring out from…

  • Bullfinch sky

    Bullfinch sky

    A dash up to Gribdale to catch the sunset. At first a disappointment but then the distant clouds caught fire. This was twenty minutes or so after the actual sunset, well into twilight; the display lasted barely five minutes before fading. According to the writer Robert Macfarlane, the Finnish call this orange afterglow of twilight…

  • Gribdale and Easby Moor from Cliff Rigg

    Gribdale and Easby Moor from Cliff Rigg

    St Swithin’s day if thou dost rain’ For forty days it will remain; St Swithin’s day if thou be fair, For forty days will rain na mair. So goes the well-known rhyme, and as it’s St Swithin’s day, and as it’s been a lovely dry day, a summer of sunshine awaits us. It all began…

  • St. Agnes’s Day

    St. Agnes’s Day

    Storm Christoph slashed its tail last night as it passed over to the North Sea.  I think we got off lightly although the village flood defences kicked in. The rain last evening had turned to snow sometime during the night. Today is the feast day of St. Agnes. She is the patron saint of chastity,…

  • Ayton Banks Alum Works

    Ayton Banks Alum Works

    While Capt. Cook was swanning around the South Pacific, back home in Great Ayton, a nascent chemical industry was burgeoning on the escarpment slope at Gribdale. Alum, crystals of hydrated aluminium sulphate in combination with another alkali (usually potassium sulphate), was in much demand for a variety of uses: as a fixing agent in dyeing,…

  • Saturday morning in Gribdale

    Saturday morning in Gribdale

    It’s 10:30 on a dreich Saturday morning. Cloud base is about 270m, Roseberry Topping wears a cap, there’s a brisk wind, and it’s mizzling, that light, fine, mist-like rain that nevertheless slowly wets you through. And Gribdale car park is full. Only the odd space remaining. This year, the first lockdown saw a step-change in…

  • Remembrance Sunday

    Remembrance Sunday

    Members of the Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team conducted a socially-distanced commemoration at the memorial to the airmen who were killed when a Lockheed Hudson aircraft crashed on Easby Moor in the early hours of 11th February 1940. The aircraft was one of a flight of three which had taken off from Thornaby airfield on a…

  • Roseberry from Cockshaw Quarry

    Roseberry from Cockshaw Quarry

    What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full…