Out & About …

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

Category: Tabular Hills

  • Scotch Corner Chapel

    Scotch Corner Chapel

    I’m currently reading “The Plot” by Madeleine Bunting. It is the story of her father’s obsession with an acre of land adjoining the old Hambleton drovers’ road as it descends from the high moors to Oldstead and the Vale of York. Although I’ve passed by before, it is not an area I know that well.…

  • Staindale Beck

    Staindale Beck

    On what must be the warmest day of the year. Sunshine and the peaceful bubbling of the stream. A lotic moment at Low Staindale in Dalby Forest, time out while helping with some fencing for the National Trust. Open Space Web-Map builder Code

  • Prehistoric linear boundary at the Bridestones

    Prehistoric linear boundary at the Bridestones

    The National Trust’s second winter season of tree and scrub clearance of the prehistoric linear boundary at Bridestones is almost over. Tree felling stops in the spring and summer to avoid disturbance of nesting birds. Just remaining for this winter is to stack the brashings and logs to create wildlife refuges. The Bronze Age earthwork…

  • The Devil’s Punchbowl

    The Devil’s Punchbowl

    In the Devil’s Punchbowl, the Hole of Horcum; the enormous bowl created not by the temper of the giant Wade but by slow and unremitting power of water during and immediately after the last ice age, 18,000 years ago. These erosion gullies are a reminder of this erosion. Where the snowmelt and rainwater seeping through…

  • The Pepperpot, Bridestones

    The Pepperpot, Bridestones

    Of the fascinating sandstone columns and rock outcrops that are known as the Bridestones, the Pepperpot is perhaps the most photographed. The Bridestones are the last remnants of a Jurassic sedimentary rock layer deposited some 150 million years ago that have been eroded over the millennia by wind, frost and rain. The name is not…

  • Rievaulx⁩ Abbey

    Rievaulx⁩ Abbey

    The image of the life Cistercian monk is one of austerity, hard manual work and self-sufficiency, and one of the first Cistercian monasteries to be founded in the North of England was in the valley of the River Rye at Rievaulx⁩, in 1132. Seen here from the National Trust’s Rievaulx⁩ Terrace property, it grew to…

  • Boundary Stone, Hambleton End

    Boundary Stone, Hambleton End

    Boundary Stone on Black Hambleton in the Tabular Hills.

  • Grain Slack

    Grain Slack

    Discovered a new area of moorland today. Thompson’s Rigg, part of the National Trust’s Blakey Topping property. Heather dominates the rigg, hiding the prehistoric field system, cairnfield and hollow ways. Across Grain Slack, a diverse shallow valley is Allerston High Moor, also Trust land. In the distance, the commercial plantations of Langdale Forest have been…

  • White Gill

    White Gill

    In the Tabular Hills, limestone country in the southern half of the North York Moors and a view west over the Vale of Mowbray to the Yorkshire Dales, supposedly one of the “finest views in all of England”.  White Gill, the stream at the bottom of a deep valley with no name, and downstream, the village of Kepwick.…

  • Black Hambleton

    Black Hambleton

    The Tabular Hills make up most of the southern half of the North York Moors. Hills with a hard limestone cap. At 1,308 feet Black Hambleton is the highest point making it, for hill bagging enthusiasts, both a Hump and a Tump. A Hump stands for HUndred Metre Prominence and is defined as a hill with a drop…