Out & About …

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

  • Hanging Stone and the Vale of Mowbray

    Hanging Stone and the Vale of Mowbray

    A circular walk from Osmotherley with the intention of having a gander at Nunhouse Farm, the site of a Benedictine nuns priory, just south of the village of Thimbleby. William Grainge wrote in 1859 of a hidden treasure “At a small farmhouse immediately in the plain below, called Nunhouse, near to Thimbleby Banks, tradition says,…

  • “Spare the Trees”

    “Spare the Trees”

    “Two facts confront us, and deserve serious consideration. The forests of the world are going just as the coal beneath our feet is going โ€” man is a cooking animal, and must have fuel. In all the great outlets of water floods multiply, and become more and more destructive. We are compelled to ask if…

  • Quiz time: what is a scud?

    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,…

  • Deck the halls with boughs of holly, Fa la la la la la la la!

    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 โ€” 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…

  • Clear felling on Little Ayton Moor has opened up super views across Great Ayton Moor all the way to Highcliff Nab

    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…

  • Is this how the lord of the manor avoided mixing with the common folk?

    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…

  • With the cloud hiding most signs of modernity โ€” a notable exception being the well-worn paths โ€” I can’t help thinking that this a timeless view

    With the cloud hiding most signs of modernity โ€” a notable exception being the well-worn paths โ€” 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…

  • Saltwick Bay and Black Nab

    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…

  • A day of strange atmospherics

    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…

  • Carr Ridge, Urra Moor

    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.ย  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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