Tag: 20th Century
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Lord Feversham’s Legacy: A peep into the history of Bilsdale
The main north-south route in the western half of the North York Moors winds through the beautiful Bilsdale valley. From the northern point of Clay Bank to the southern point of Newgate Bank, the dale is dotted with farms that boast vast fields of pasture, all bounded by sturdy dry-stone walls. The farms are enclosed…
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A lesson for us all: beware of the tallyman
A few scattered hawthorn trees mark the vestiges of an old hedgerow. Little Roseberry and Black Bank in the distance. The massive credit facility needed by our former Prime Minister has been making the headlines recently. A lifestyle that demands this amount of money ‘on tick‘ is incomprehensible to me. At the turn of the…
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Flashback to 1948: ‘Yorkshire dale to begin new life’
Bransdale Eastside and the farmsteads of Smout House (formerly Loft House and now the National Trust’s office and stores), Toad Hole, and Cow Sike. I came across an interesting article in the Yorkshire Post dated 27 November 1948, which gives a very good insight of what life was like in Bransdale in the first half…
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A view across Kildale to the side valley of Lonsdale.
In the right distance is ‘New Row’, a terrace of six single story cottages built by the Lonsdale Mining Company in 1865-7, and added to by six 2-story houses for the Whinstone miners. In front of New Row is the Kildale Sports Field, newly decked out for the forthcoming football season. In the late 1970s,…
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Johnny Longstaff
This photo of Cliff Rigg quarry looks along the whinstone ridge of the Cleveland Dyke towards Stockton-on-Tees where it crosses the Tees at Preston. I’ve posted about the Dyke many times before, so today I will write about a Stocktonian ā Johnny Longstaff, who on this day in 1938 was shot and seriously wounded while…
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Capt. Cook’s Monument
It’s been quite a few weeks since I last posted a photo of the dear old monument on Easby Moor to Great Ayton’s favourite son. Over the years, it’s been through its trials and tribulations. The originally one was made of wood and erected in 1827 but it caught fire and was replaced by the…
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The hills look down on Westerdale, and Westerdale looks at the hills
So the Whitby gazette wrote in 1911, borrowing heavily from Lord Bryon’s poem about the battle at Marathon. Today it’s such a sleepy village, home to about a hundred and thirty retirees and professionals, with a handful of working farms. Its location is not conducive as a base for walking, so most of us fly…
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Park Nab
The Northern Weekly Gazette was published in Stockton-on-Tees between 1895 and 1932. Its byline was “A Home Journal Written by the People for the People“. The price in 1913 was one old penny. One of the regular sections was the “Children’s Circle ā Conducted by Daddy” in which letters written by children were published. On…
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Farndale
Whenever I see Farndale, my imagination is drawn not to its famous swathes of daffodils in the Spring but to what the dale would look like if Hull Corporation had had its way and built its proposed reservoir. The scheme was first mooted in the 1932, when the Corporation began negotiations to purchase 2,000 acres…
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Eilean NĆ²staig
The windswept rolling headland of Ardnave Point is a mix of machair and sand dunes and populated by inquistive sheep. Along the Atlantic facing coast, a strange abandoned arrangement of concrete dam walls and rusty sluice gates, too small for a boat. I read that it is an abandoned lobster farm. Further information has proved…