Out & About …

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

Month: July 2019

  • Sprinkling Tarn from Green Gable

    Sprinkling Tarn from Green Gable

    It took me a while to recognise some of the fells when the clouds broke descending Green Gable to Windy Gap. Sprinkling Tarn is a long sliver and it seems strange looking down on it. On the right is the bulk of Great End. And in the distance the Langdale Pikes, a different view from…

  • Castle Rock of Triermain

    Castle Rock of Triermain

    From Low Bridge Farm in St. John’s-in-the-Vale (lovely coffee shop with delicious scones). The scene of a rockfall “as big as a bungalow” last November. The farmer was telling me his family was sitting in the porch when the fall occurred. A rumble was initially dismissed as a low flying jet, a frequent sight along…

  • Side Pike

    Side Pike

    A small knoll at the western end of Lingmoor Fell. Across Great Langdale, the Langdale Pikes flirt with the cloud base. Open Space Web-Map builder Code

  • The Fairfield Horseshoe

    The Fairfield Horseshoe

    A classic fell race, up one ridge, down the other, starting from Rydal, 10 miles with 900m of climb. Won in about 75 minutes. Viewed from Loughrigg Fell. Open Space Web-Map builder Code

  • Crown End

    Crown End

    A run from Kildale to Castleton. Took a slight detour to look at the ancient bronze age settlement remains on Crown End of Westerdale Moor. The end is a spur, due north of the village of Westerdale at a height of 236 metres. Plenty of humps and bumps and a bits of rocks but not…

  • Five-spot Burnet moth

    Five-spot Burnet moth

    A fairly common but striking moth, photographed here on Stinking Willie or the Common Ragwort. Common Ragwort is one of Britain’s much-maligned wildflowers. Supposedly toxic to horses and cattle but the plant is generally ignored by grazing animals. The problem occurs when ragwort gets mixed in hay for winter feeding. On the other hand, ragwort…

  • Hog in the fog

    Hog in the fog

    Yorkshire Fog that is, Holcus lanatus, although grasses are difficult to identify so I may have dropped a clanger here. No doubt someone will put me right. And it may well be a double clanger. A hog is a young sheep, one or two years old that hasn’t been sheared. Count as poetic licence. Back…

  • Post medieval trod from Stokesley to Whitby

    Post medieval trod from Stokesley to Whitby

    I stumbled across this today quite by accident. A small section of a stone trod running parallel to and about 20 metres from the Commondale to Three Howes Rigg modern road. It is recorded on the NYM NP Historical Environment Records (HER) map as “a section of the post-medieval trod or trackway from White Cross…

  • Harlequin Ladybird

    Harlequin Ladybird

    Found this wee beastie in the garden. A bishy barny bee as they say in Norfolk. But this is no ordinary ladybird, it’s a Harlequin ladybird, Harmonia axyridis, a voracious invader from Asia. Sometime in the 1980s farmers in the U.S. began introducing the Harlequin to North America to control the aphids that were feeding…

  • Hey, it’s good to be back home again

    Hey, it’s good to be back home again

    So the John Denver song goes. Open Space Web-Map builder Code