Out & About …

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

Category: North York Moors

  • On Gisborough Moor

    On Gisborough Moor

    With a rather dull view across the patchwork moors of Codhill Heights and Great Ayton Moor to Capt. Cook’s Monument. In the foreground, the triangulation pillar on Gisborough Moor, 324m above sea level. Or 1,063 feet as our esteemed Prime Minister would have it. Or maybe he prefers cubits — a cubit being the distance between…

  • Shit Sack Day

    Shit Sack Day

    Two years ago I posted about Royal Oak Day, 29th May, to commemorate when Charles II returned to London and was restored as King in 1660. On this day, true Royalists wear a sprig of oak leaves in recognition of Charles’s escape by hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel House, Shropshire, after his defeat…

  • Fangdale Beck

    Fangdale Beck

    I find it frustrating photographing villages, there are always cars parked along the lanes and many interesting buildings have undergone conversion into residential. Take for example the methodist chapel at Fangdale Beck, half way down Bilsdale. Built in 1927, last used in 1984, and since converted. To me, it is a rather unusual methodist chapel…

  • Newly painted Roseberry trig point

    Newly painted Roseberry trig point

    Roseberry’s trig point received a fresh coat of brillant white this morning. A clean canvas for a new generation of graffiti artists. How long until the first arrives?

  • May Blossom

    May Blossom

    I hadn’t realised until recently just how short flowering seasons are. Snowdrops, Daffodils, Blackthorn. We’re just spent three weeks away. Before leaving, the Bluebells were only just beginning to carpet the woods, now they’re past their sell-by date and going to seed. Appropriately towards the end of May, the May or Hawthorn tree has burst…

  • Park Nab

    Park Nab

    On This Day 25th May 1659, “His Most Serene Highness By the Grace of God, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Dominions thereunto belonging” the Lord Protector Richard Cromwell resigned his position. So ended our flirtation with republicanism, leading to the restoration of the monarchy and the crowning of…

  • The Cleveland Way

    The Cleveland Way

    Buy any Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map nowadays and you’ll find it criss-crossed by lines of green diamonds — the symbol for a National Trail or Long Distance Path. In 1965, the first such trail was launched, The Pennine Way, and the second was our very own Cleveland Way, opened four years later on this day,…

  • James Emerson of Easby Hall

    James Emerson of Easby Hall

    “Charming and ingeneous” according to the ever euphuistic Pevsner, Easby Hall was built sometime between 1808 and 1823 soon after Robert Campion acquired the Lordship of the Manor. Campion was a Whitby based banker who acquired his money from shipbuilding, sail cloth manufacture and other industries. He also was responsible for the erection of Capt.…

  • ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’

    ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’

    I don’t usually do this view — on a sunny day it would be into the sun — but, a bit cloudy today, and with a surprising chilly wind. From Great Ayton Moor. On this day (23rd April) in 1605, Walter Calverley of Calverley Hall murdered his two sons, and seriously wounded his wife, and…

  • An old holloway up Carlton Bank

    An old holloway up Carlton Bank

    I tried to use a little used Public Footpath which loops around from the foot of Carlton Bank to the now demolished Underhill House. But I became distracted by a mountain bike track and ending zig-zagging up through the trees eventually coming across an old holloway, well above the present road. Overgrown by gorse, it…