Category: Cleveland Hills
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More moor burning
As soon as the weather improves so the heather burning resumes. The left-hand plume is, I think, on Cold Moor, the right, on Snilesworth. A further one, behind me to the east is Gisborough Moor. Six weeks to go before the season ends for this winter, on 15th April. If you want some good news,…
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Kildale
Where is Kildale? It seems such a vague place. The village is well known but where exactly is Killi’s dale. Generally, the parish encloses the upper reaches of the River Leven but it also extends into the watershed of the River Esk with Sleddale Beck and Baysdale Beck forming the boundary. Most, but not all…
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If the sun smiles on St. Eulalie’s day, …
My reprint of an 1869 book, “Weather Lore” by R. Inwards says that today, 12th February is St. Eulalie’s day. But who was St. Eulalie? St. Eulalie is included in lots of French commune names and the saying quoted is from the French. Now saints are not my thing so I have only made a…
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Greenhow Burton
A moment’s reflection watching the shadows of the cloud flit across the fields of Greenhow Burton. Today is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and a disturbing fact I heard this morning that a recent poll had found that one in 20 Europeans had never heard of the murder of…
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The Cleveland Dyke
A view north-west from Cliff Ridge along Langbaurgh Ridge and the line of the intrusion of igneous rock known as the Cleveland Dyke. The basaltic rock was intruded as molten magma flowed from a volcanic source near the Island of Mull in Scotland 58 million years ago. It is calculated the flow took up to…
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Gold Hill, Faceby Bank and Whorl Hill
A beautiful morning for a run along the escarpment to Knolls End and back via Thackdale. Surveying from left to right. Live Moor, peppered with Bronze Age features, barrows and field systems, was in the 19th-century common grazing for the villagers of Swainby who kept their donkeys used to carry coal and other goods. That…
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Old gate posts, Halliday Slack
A slack is a word frequently found in the names of the very upper tributaries of moorland becks. It’s a northern word for the marshy shallow area between two stretches of rising ground. Yet Halliday Slack is a steep, precipitous gorge in the escarpment of the Cleveland Hills between Kirby and Broughton Banks. Thirty metres…
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A wet and wild Wainstones
What more is there to say? Perhaps a poem, a sonnet in fact, written in flowery Victorian language but titled quite simply “The Wainstones, Broughton Bank” From early youth, to more than three-score years, I’ve loved to climb the mountain on which stand The rugged WAINSTONES; or on every hand Are scenes of beauty; Cleveland…
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The Cleveland Hills
Not a rare phenomena on the Cleveland Hills but one of my favourites. Typically in the colder months fog in the Bilsdale valley spills over the low points in the hills, Haggs Gate, Garfit Gap and the Lords’ Stone. High above the delicate cirrus clouds portend the advance of a weather front bringing rain. These…
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White Hill and Haggs Gate
Or perhaps better known nowadays as Hasty Bank and Clay Bank Top. Clay Bank Top is one of several low points along the Cleveland escarpment formed water overflowed from small meltwater lakes trapped between the scarp and the glacier covering the Cleveland plain and the Vale of Mowbray. Water flowed down Bilsdale and Ryedale into…