Out & About …

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

  • CSRT Remembrance Commemoration

    CSRT Remembrance Commemoration

    The Cleveland Search and Rescue Team held their Remembrance Commemoration at the memorial plaque to the airmen who were killed in the Lockheed Hudson aircraft crash in 1940. See here and here for more details. It has been recommended to me that I read Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Gardener’ on this day. It’s a…

  • The Tragedy of the Commons

    The Tragedy of the Commons

    Aireyholme was once the common pasture for the parish of Great Ayton. Parishioners had various rights on the land. Usually this would include the right right to pasture cattle, but Common Land may include other rights such as collecting wood, piscary, the right to fish and turbery, the right to cut turves of peat for…

  • Westerdale Hall

    Westerdale Hall

    Originally built as a shooting lodge by Colonel Duncombe in the “Baronial Tudor style”, sometime before 1874, between 1946 and 1992, Westerdale Hall was a youth hostel but now it is a private residence. Today, the hall is largely hidden, surrounded by mature trees, but would, in its day, have commanded good views over the…

  • Scarth Wood Moor

    Scarth Wood Moor

    Another one of those local tales. I was told by an Osmotherley resident a few months ago, that this gulley, about 3 metres long and a metre or so deep, was used for rifle practice by a “home guard” unit during WW1. Now I’m not sure if there was a home guard during that war.…

  • Ardenside

    Ardenside

    I came across a rather poignant tale the other day. It concerned William Wass of Ardenside who was called up to fight in the Crimean War. Now one way of escaping the call up apparently was to get someone else to go in your place and so Wass persuaded his friend, John Barr, who subsequently…

  • Castle Hill, Easby

    Castle Hill, Easby

    From a distance Castle Hill is barely a ripple on the flatlands of the Vale of Cleveland. Now dominated by mature trees, it would, in the 12th-century, have commanded fine views and overlooked any movement on the King’s road from Stokesley to Whitby that passed the foot of the eminence on which the castle stood.…

  • COP26 continues and I am getting more confused about the statistics brandied about

    COP26 continues and I am getting more confused about the statistics brandied about

    We are told that, as a species, our activities emit 34 gigatonnes of CO² per year which would need around 68 million square kilometres of forest to ‘sequestrate’ — this is about half the planet’s land area, so a bit unrealistic. These numbers are vast. Gigatonnes. I can no more visualise a gigatonne than I…

  • River Leven, Low Green, Great Ayton

    River Leven, Low Green, Great Ayton

    I remember the day when the government U-turned on their proposal to allow privatised water companies to continue the routine dumping of raw sewage into our rivers and our beaches, after a public outcry and a rebellion by 22 Tory MPs, an amendment to the environment bill that would have provided some safeguards was voted…

  • The day Guisborough led the nation

    The day Guisborough led the nation

    A view of Highcliff Nab across Bold Venture Gill. This boundary stone is one of a line of marking the former boundary of Guisborough and Hutton Lowcross boundary. It is inscribed ‘T.C. G. 1860’; standing for Thomas Chaloner and Guisborough. But it is his father, Robert Chaloner, I want to write about today. I have…

  • Battle of Inkerman

    Battle of Inkerman

    Remember, remember the 5th of November … Not because of “the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”, but because it is also the anniversary of the Battle of Inkerman in 1854 when the allied armies of Britain and France defeated the Imperial Russian Army during the Crimean war. 635 British soldiers, 175 French…

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