Month: April 2021
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Cheese Stones
A recent Facebook posting mentioned a “font” on the Cheese Stones on Ingleby Moor. I was intrigued. It’s been a few years since I visited this sandstone outcrop but I had never heard of a rock-font. A little prompting revealed the information was found “on the web”, but the only reference I could find was…
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Blackthorn, Thief Lane
In 2012, a human headless torso was discovered during industrialised cutting of peat from a bog in in Rossan, Co. Meath. The lower half had been destroyed by the peat cutting machinery. It was dated to the Iron Age and became known as the Moydrum Man although the slenderness of the skeletal remains suggests this…
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Smout House Sundial, Bransdale
Back in Bransdale volunteering for the National Trust. Life is getting back to normal. You don’t often come across a sundial in the middle of a field. This is one of a pair (as far as I know) near to Smout House, the National Trust’s Estate Office. The other is close to Bransdale Mill and…
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Rosedale West Kilns
Ironstone has been mined in Rosedale since medieval times, but it was only small scale operations. It was in the mid-19th-century with the discovery of a very high quality seam near Hollins Farm that extraction became more serious. The mine opened in 1853 with ore being carried down the valley by a pannier train of…
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Prehistoric Roseberry
I wrote the other day that the name Airyholme (the farm in the centre of the photograph) derives from the Old Norse ƦĢrgum meaning āat the shielingsā. That’s the seventh and eighth centuries, but what of earlier times? The Romans seem to have had Cleveland under control, perhaps they felt the Brigantes, the local tribe,…
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Duncombe Park Army Camp
About 3km after crossing Rievaulx Bridge with its opportunity to gaze at the majestic abbey, the Cleveland Way crosses a concrete road at Griff Lodge. Here the National Trail bears left to Helmsley avoiding Duncombe Park. The concrete road is a reminder of the military presence during WW2 at Duncombe Park. Following it through Park…
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Eston Bank
I do try to avoid anniversaries of births and deaths in these postings but on this in 1891, John Marley, the mining engineer who, it could be said, along with John Vaughan, gave birth to the iron industry on Teesside, died at the age of 67. Iron had been worked in the Cleveland area since…
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Ruffianly Attack on a Farmer
I just love it on those days when I awake without a clue, metaphorically speaking, of where I’m going and end up down the proverbially rabbit hole. An opportunity today for a one way trip from the Lords’ Stone (or the Lord’s Stones as the cafĆ© has been called) to Clay Bank via Raisdale. This…
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Aireyholme Farm
They must be lambing around now at Aireyholme Farm, the 1st April being the traditional date. There are plenty of sheep in the surrounding fields. Although a single farm now, Aireyholme was recorded in the Domesday Book as the manor of Ergun. It must have a been a moderately sized settlement then and the name…
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On the 1st April 1933 …
… the Nazis carried out their very first nationwide, planned action against the Jewish people, an economic boycott of Jewish businesses (although large employers were exempted). It was the first openly anti-Semitic act of Hitlerās new government and was ostensively in response to international protests, notably in America, in support of the Jews but also…