Out & About …

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

Tag: dale

  • At the west end of Scot Crags

    At the west end of Scot Crags

    Well, it’s Scot Crags according to the first mappers of the Ordnance Survey. Probably better known as Barker’s Crags nowadays. I am looking down on the spur they mapped as Rakes Intake where Snotterdale merges with Scugdale. Scugdale is both an unusual valley and one of contrasts. It is one of the few east-west lying…

  • Newlands Valley

    Newlands Valley

    It seems appropriate that, on what would have been Alfred Wainwright’s 113th birthday, to post a photo of a Wainwright, one of those 214 Lakeland fells listed in the seven volumes of his Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells. Well, here we have a pair of them, Catbells and Maiden Moor. Grumpy, stubborn, reclusive and…

  • Sleddale

    Sleddale

    In the late 1940s, a series of articles appeared in the “Evening Gazette” describing rambles on the moors and in the Tees valley. These were very popular and were published in book form in 1949 under the title “Green Ways around Tees-Side“. The other day I found a coverless battered copy I had forgotten I…

  • Little Fryup Dale

    Little Fryup Dale

    Thanks to Martyn, a slight diversion to investigate the site of Fryup Church. I must have cycled up this lane to the Yorkshire Cycle Hub dozens of times and I never knew there was once a church in this field opposite Stonebeck Gate Farm. But the evidence is there. The wall this side of the…

  • Baysdale

    Baysdale

    I very much doubt that any of these ruined barns is the one that gave its name to the “cowshed valley”, remote and isolated. Once Baysdale was home to a population of fairies who washed their ‘fairy butter’ in a favourite spring and left overnight on gate posts and fences after apparently throwing blobs at…

  • Tripsdale

    Tripsdale

    In Bransdale on a dull, damp morning installing some rabbit fencing for the National Trust. Digging a trench to bury some chicken wire. That’ll stop the rabbits burrowing under. Up to my ankles in mud. The rabbits would need some serious snorkelling equipment. All not very photogenic so here’s a picture from yesterday. Tripsdale viewed…

  • Wheeldale

    Wheeldale

    Wheeldale Beck, one of the upper tributaries of the Murk Esk, between Goathland and Wheeldale Moors. The house bottom left is Wheeldale Lodge, built at the turn of the 20th century as a gamekeeper’s house, probably James Patterson, who was the keeper to the Duchy of Lancaster when he “discovered” the nearby “Roman Road” in…

  • Little Fryup Dale

    Little Fryup Dale

    It’s been a few months since I’ve been up on the Heads, that elongated hill separating the two Fryup Dales. This is the head of the smaller dale. The buildings on the far left are named on the map as Fairy Cross Plain. There are two cottages, one is relatively modern but the other has…

  • Bransdale

    Bransdale

    A refreshing day spent in Bransdale, making repairs to some of the field boundaries. Bransdale’s walls are quite distinctive. In other uplands, dry stone walls are constructed of two skins of stonework, usually dressed and tapering inwards towards the top, with the gap filled with small pieces. Bransdale’s walls are just a single skin, huge…

  • The Bilsdale Bombardier

    The Bilsdale Bombardier

    A view down Garfit Gap and into Bilsdale. The farm in the centre is Whingroves, which seems to have diversified into an industrial pheasant rearing farm. In 1896 though it would have been a typical North York Moors dales mixed farm, run by Isaac Garbutt, a family name that has been recorded in the Bilsdale…