Out & About …

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

Tag: hill

  • The National Trust, 125 years old today

    The National Trust, 125 years old today

    On this day in 1895 three Victorian philanthropists, Miss Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley met and founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. Octavia Hill had campaigned about the poor availability of open spaces for poor people and developments on suburban woodlands. She had helped to…

  • Painted Rock

    Painted Rock

    My heart sank when I came across this while descending Little Roseberry. Now call me a killjoy but is this really necessary in a National Park, “our most breath-taking and treasured landscapes”. It’s only a painted pebble left in a prominent place and asking finders to post photos to a Facebook page. A craze from…

  • St. Nicholas’s ā€œgold ballsā€

    St. Nicholas’s ā€œgold ballsā€

    After the season’s festivities, the big cleanup begins. Roseberry is no different. A morning spent litter picking with the National Trust. The usual: cans, plastic bottles, little doggie presents. And plenty of orange peel scattered around, accompanied by the inevitable wet-wipe. What’s the big thing about oranges at Christmas? St. Nicholas’s ā€œgold ballsā€. Of course,…

  • White Hill and Haggs Gate

    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…

  • Roseberry through Gribdale Gap

    Roseberry through Gribdale Gap

    They say the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow but this is apparently a myth. The Swedes certainly have 25 but the top prize must go to the Scots who have had 421. From ā€œMell-moorinā€, a fall of fine, drifting snow to “skelvie“, large flakes of softly falling snow. Now I don’t know what…

  • Vae diei

    Vae diei

    Roseberry Topping A familiar homely view for a day of doom and gloom. To remind us that life goes on and all is not lost.

  • Mount Vittoria

    Mount Vittoria

    Another overcast and windy day with just the one brief glimpse of the sun. It happened when I was perambulating Cringle Moor, with Cold Moor getting the benefit. Or should I call it Mount Vittoria, the name on the 1857 map for the plantation which covered it. A much preferable name. I’m guessing that it…

  • Ounsbury toppin hill

    Ounsbury toppin hill

    So Christopher Saxton annotated the hill in his Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales which he published in 1579. Commissioned by Elizabeth I, it was the first definitive map of England and Wales with each county being engraved on a separate copper plate on a scale of 1″ to 3ā…“ miles. Maps were…

  • Roseberry and Black Bank

    Roseberry and Black Bank

    Odin’s hill from Ayton Bank. On the right is Little Roseberry with Black Bank almost clear-felled of its coniferous plantation. It’s barely ten years ago but I find it hard to remember what it was like. A tour of the escarpment on a glorious morning with blue skies. Lower down the fields are a bit…

  • High Bousdale from Roseberry

    High Bousdale from Roseberry

    A view from the summit of Roseberry Topping towards Guisborough down the forested valley of High Bousdale, between Bousdale Hill and Ryston Bank with the Hanging Stone at its nab. High Bousdale was once contemplated as a means of access to the ironstone holdings below Roseberry. There would have been an incline from the Middlesbrough…