Month: December 2022
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Quiz time: what is a scud?
If you’d have asked me a week or so ago, I would have said a Scud was a Soviet Union designed ballistic missiles used in the Iraq war. I have since learnt that a scud is a glider, a low-level detached, irregular cloud, and an acronym that is too crude for me to repeat here, […]
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Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la!
It’s been a bumper year for all sorts of fruits and berries, and the holly is no exception. I was fascinated by this holly bush on Ryston Bank — the northern slope of Little Roseberry. Its branches are laden with bright red berries. In the distance is the flat topped Bousdale Hill with its fields […]
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Clear felling on Little Ayton Moor has opened up super views across Great Ayton Moor all the way to Highcliff Nab
A light overnight snowfall hides the debris from the forestry work. I guess the remainder of the forestry will go in due course. Great Ayton Moor has a wealth of archaeological features which I’ve posted about many times before. A chambered cairn, a cairnfield , an Iron Age enclosure, and numerous tumuli. Elgee thought that […]
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Is this how the lord of the manor avoided mixing with the common folk?
Pevsner described St. Andrew’s Church at Ingleby Greenhow as “Low, with a squat little bell-turret. The exterior seems unassumingly Georgian. It was in fact almost entirely rebuilt in 1741.” He goes on to identify various Norman architectual features, a window in the west wall of the bell-turret and some moulding around the priest’s doorway. So […]
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With the cloud hiding most signs of modernity — a notable exception being the well-worn paths — I can’t help thinking that this a timeless view
It is certainly a view the young James Cook would have recognised while he lived with his family at Aireyholme Farm. Cook of course would go on to achieve fame with his navigational exploits in the Pacific, beginning with his trip to Tahiti to observe of the Transit of Venus. He left England aboard the […]
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Saltwick Bay and Black Nab
When King Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries, Whitby Abbey did not escape. Its fixtures and furnishings were all sold off with the funds going into the King’s coffers. The lead on the roof was stripped and used on the nearby St. Mary’s Church which until then had a thatched roof. The bells […]
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A day of strange atmospherics
On this day in 2005, at 0601 in the morning, a huge explosion rocked an oil depot in Buncefield near Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was the largest in peacetime Europe and the noise is said to have been heard as far away as the Netherlands. I seem to remember people at work saying they […]
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Carr Ridge, Urra Moor
It is recorded that this standing stone is a “Post Medieval” waymarker. A stone has stood over 450 winters reassuring travellers across the bleak Urra Moor, the highest point of the North York Moors. The only sound that broke the muffling of the cloud was the frequent ‘go-back, back, back‘ call of the Red grouse […]
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There is nothing as exhilerating as being out in the snow
Well ok, it was only a smattering, a ‘greymin‘, barely enough to cover the rocks on this Bronze Age tumulus on Great Ayton Moor. ” ‘Twas frost and thro leet wid a o’ greymin snaw“. On my walk up Roseberry through Newton Wood, the feathery pruinescence of the dead bracken fonds meant I was not […]
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Bransdale
Only the ice covered road in the foreground is a give away for the temperature. A brisk day in Bransdale, blue skies and brilliant sunshine. In spite of snow falling overnight on the coastal North York Moors, not a flake had fallen on Blakey Ridge for the drive over. But with snow forecasted in the […]